Nick Martell

But Jack, pause the pod for a second.

When you mentioned the consortium, I'm envisioning like a team of characters in Star Wars, the consortium.

What do we mean by the consortium that bought TikTok?

Leading the pack is Oracle, which is owned by Larry Ellison.

Besties, of course, you know Larry Ellison in the news for buying Paramount for his son and now trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery as well.

Well, now his tech company, Oracle, will house and audit TikTok's source code on its U.S.-located data servers.

Okay, so we got Oracle owning 15% of TikTok U.S.

and Silverlake, a random private equity firm in California, they own another 15% of American TikTok.

Oh, you want random?

How about MGX, a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund?

They're going to get 15% of TikTok US as well.

All right.

So Jack, let me whip out the whiteboard and calculator here.

Three times 15%.

That's 45%.

Jack, who owns the other 55% of American TikTok?

We didn't get exact percentages of the rest of the investors, but they include Michael Dell, billionaire founder of Dell Computers, and VC firms like Susquehanna, General Atlantic, and seven other VCs who previously had invested in China's ByteDance.

Mr. Beast, the YouTube star, he tossed his hat publicly in the ring and said he'd love to own a piece of TikTok.

He got left out.

Ah.