Trump’s tariffs killed his TikTok deal
Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.
As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok.
People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity.
The proposal, which would have licensed the app’s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and I’ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government.
On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance issued its first statement on the situation, saying that “any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”
After suggesting on Thursday that China would approve a TikTok deal in exchange for tariff relief, the president seemed less confident on Friday: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!).”
Anyone who has been closely following this tortured saga that is the TikTok ban is exhausted. Now, five years after he first tried to ban it, Trump has seemingly torpedoed the plan that was finally going to keep TikTok running.
His friend Larry Ellison was going to secure more business for Oracle by reviving the broad strokes of the Project Texas security proposal that was made to the previous administration (albeit this time with fewer security guarantees, since this administration doesn’t really care about national security threats the app may or may not pose). TikTok’s investors and employees were finally going to get certainty about the app’s fate. ByteDance was going to effectively stay in the driver’s seat while maintaining control of its algorithm. And Trump was going to get to say that he saved TikTok.
TikTok gets to continue operating in the US for a while longer, thanks to Trump’s Department of Justice not enforcing a ban that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. TikTok’s US hosting providers, including Apple, Google, and Oracle, are seemingly still okay with this situation despite the fact that they are very much breaking the law. And unless Trump ultimately eases on tariffs against China, TikTok may end up banned after all.
What a giant farce.
More headlines
- OpenAI is going to release its o3 and o4-mini models “in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months.”
- DOGE staffers have arrived at the FTC.
- Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration was disrupted by multiple employees protesting its AI business with the Israeli government.
- Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, is laying off about 16 percent of employees.
- Adobe is the latest company to axe DEI hiring goals.
Job board
Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:
- Joelle Pineau’s departure from Meta means that Yann LeCun is the interim head of AI research while the company looks for a permanent leader. When I last interviewed her in October, Pineau seemed very bought into her role at Meta. Since then, I’m told she has privately expressed concern with the company’s Trump-fueled policy changes, which I’m told are also impacting the upcoming Llama 4 release. More broadly, her exit signals that, like its peers, Meta is shifting its AI research from being more free-wheeling towards directly supporting its business goals.
- Well, that’s awkward! Less than two weeks after she appeared as the main character in a glossy magazine story about Google’s efforts to beat ChatGPT, Gemini product chief Sissie Hsiao is out (though, in classic Google fashion, apparently finding a role in the company elsewhere). The Gemini app team’s new leader is Josh Woodward, who also leads the Labs org behind the breakout hit that has been NotebookLM. While Woodward seems to be generally well-liked inside Google, Hsiao’s reign has been, to put it mildly, controversial. Sundar Pichai’s main goal is for the Gemini app to surpass ChatGPT this year. The pressure is on.
- In the wake of co-CEO Han Jong-Hee’s death, Samsung’s mobile business chief, TM Roh, is taking on an expanded role also overseeing the broader devices group.
- Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at Amazon and also leading its Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk teams.
- Deel’s head of communications, Elisabeth Diana, resigned amid the HR startup’s spy scandal with Rippling.
- Tim Zaman, a former senior AI infrastructure engineer for Elon Musk, is joining OpenAI after a stint at DeepMind to work on “frontier clusters.”
More links
- Politico looks at how the tech world is scared of Elon Musk.
- Photos of the mansion Mark Zuckerberg just bought in Washington, DC.
- Tech companies are advising employees on visas not to leave the U.S.
- Bloomberg charts the “new billionaires of the AI boom.”
- Keach Hagey’s forthcoming book about OpenAI has a juicy chapter about how Sam Altman was fired by the board.
- The AI industry is arguing about this timeline prediction for how the technology will play out.
- Alex Konrad interviews the CEO of Granola, one of the few AI apps I find to be actually useful.
- Our hands-on with the Nintendo Switch 2.
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