TikTok's American Dream
For all the talk about the logistics and granular details about the TikTok deal, I’m not seeing a lot about perhaps the biggest issue: is this actually going to work? I mean that at the highest level. One of the great consumer apps is about to change hands. Is that going to destroy the product?
This is a social network that rose to prominence powered by a very specific type of algorithmic feed and fueled by the money and tactics from an insanely successful (Chinese) startup. Is it actually going to still work when owned and operated by a seemingly random group of investors whose only real congealing factor is the fact that they’re in the good graces of the current US administration?
Yes, the group is apparently going to lease said algorithm from said startup in order to recreate it to use for their own purposes. But again, is that actually going to work? There’s seemingly no real precedent for it. Maybe the best thing anyone could point to (and the best hope) here is that Meta and Google have had some success replicating the TikTok model for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, respectively. But they’re still not as successful as TikTok has been.
And those are two of the greatest tech companies that rose from startups to become trillion-dollar companies over the past couple of decades. Oracle, seemingly the key tech player here, was a startup in the 1970s. Yes, they’ve recently seen a resurgence and are also looking to join that trillion-dollar club thanks to AI, but to say their experience in such products is lacking is, well, putting it mildly.
Now obviously they’ll have others running this new TikTok, and presumably that will be at least some subset of the US team already in place. But there has been a decided lack of details here since TikTok is also going to still be operating globally outside of the US. That’s why there’s been talk of “TikTok 2” — a new version of the app which has apparently been created with the notion that it would need to operate separately. It’s now not entirely clear if that will be the case here — which would be it’s own amusing clusterfuck of a situation; trying to get millions of people to download a new app, how has that worked for HBO and others that have tried in the past? — but it doesn’t really matter. One way or another, an all-American (or I guess just non-Chinese) group is going to need to try to replace the engine of a plane with millions of passengers mid-flight.
Ideally without anyone noticing.
That’s undoubtedly the ideal situation. There’s a world in which TikTok actually improves in ways, I suppose, but it’s hard to imagine what those are right now. More likely would seem to be that people start complaining that TikTok has “gotten so much worse” since the Americans took over. That may or may not have anything to do with the service itself and more so just because people love to complain, especially on social networks, about social networks.
Remember Vine? If you do, it’s probably not fond memories about how it ended. And everyone (rightfully) blames Twitter for that. Once they bought it, instead of realizing what they had — essentially, TikTok before TikTok! — they proceeded to run it into the ground through a mixture of neglect and strategic mistakes. Twitter was always uniquely good at such self-owns, but certainly a group of investors taking over a crown jewel of young people are going to be tempted to meddle here too.
Will the aforementioned political bent play a part in that? Everyone will undoubtedly say the right things now, but wielding such power, especially when you’ve paid so handsomely for it, would tempt anyone. You don’t have to be Rupert Murdoch bending news organizations to his will, but also you can be him, since he’ll apparently be involved here — well, his Fox Corp anyway.
But even if they do leave it alone in that regard, this deal in many ways feels more like a PE takeover. Sometimes those work, but often they do not. And when they do, it’s usually only after some major changes. But the only major change anyone is looking for in TikTok will be the Chinese ownership aspect, so can a new group truly be that hands off?
At the same time, they can’t be fully hands off because they still need to incentivize the leadership and team to both stick around and keep doing what they’re doing. Presumably they’ll talk up a march towards an IPO. But that also depends on things like continued revenue growth and overall growth rates.
And all of that, at some point, will depend on not keeping everything exactly as it is, but continually changing with the times. And perhaps especially these times, given everything that is happening with AI. Regardless, TikTok, as with all such products, won’t be the hot thing forever. This would have been true no matter who owns it. But its founders owning it seemingly put it in a better position,1 historically, than whatever this looks like. But again, there’s not much real precedent here. Maybe the sale of Grindr? But even that was quite different.
Anyway, I think no one is asking this obvious question — is this actually going to work? — because there are still way too many unknowns about how it’s going to play out. But even just the Occam’s razor version of events suggests a path where this new TikTok is perhaps fine to start and then the problems start to set in, which will lead to some changes, which will hasten said problems. We’ll see, it’s just a guess. But that’s what I do.
American TikTok
Stay away from me
American TikTok
Mama, let me be
Don't come a-hangin' around my door
I don't wanna see your face no more
I got more important things to do
Than spend my time growin' old with you
Update September 26, 2025: As the sale proceeds, a (comically low) price emerges...
M.G. Siegler
1 Here’s the true footnote in history about Musical.ly being the true original TikTok. Where are those founders these days?… ↩