Trump Gets $10 Billion Kickback To The Treasury For Offloading TikTok To His Billionaire Buddies

from the bribes-for-the-king dept

We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.

It was one of the more embarrassing examples of U.S. cronyism and corruption in recent memory.

But wait, as they say, there’s more!

As the Wall Street Journal notes (paywalled), the “Trump administration” is set to receive a $10 billion fee from investors for facilitating the deal. The new owners, which include Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, private equity giant Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE) are funneling the payments, which will total $10 billion, to the “Treasury Department”:

“They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.”

We, of course, don’t actually know where that money is going and will actually be used for. You can confidently assume it will somehow eventually wind its way into Trump’s pocket somehow, since the entirety of U.S. democratic oversight has been wholly corrupted by these whiny zealots, who are busy stripping the country for parts and selling it for scrap off the back loading dock.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian:

“The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.”

The outlet goes on to note that the $10 billion fee absolutely towers over any remotely comparable historical precedent:

“Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. 

Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers. “

The Wall Street Journal can’t be bothered to note that the deal fixed absolutely none of the purported concerns raised about TikTok. China still has a major ownership stake, and the new owners seem every bit as hostile to democracy and free expression as the worst Chinese autocrat (they’re just not honest enough with themselves or you to admit it yet).

All of these owners are equally just as likely to engage in privacy and surveillance violations as the Chinese (which again, despite a lot of pretense, did not have full direct control over the app). In fact, you could even argue that the previous TikTok was likely to be better on all of these subjects because they were at least trying to adhere to ethical standards to remain operating in the country.

TikTok’s new American owners are very up front about their plans to demolish the entirety of regulatory autonomy, corporate oversight, and consumer protection, leaving them with absolute freedom to pursue whatever unethical bullshit they can dream up. I suspect they’ll try to leave things alone for a year (to avoid a mass exodus of young people) before their goals become… unsubtle.

Again, Trump, with Democratic help, managed to steal the world’s most popular short form video app and offload it to his radical billionaire friends under the pretense he was protecting national security and U.S. consumer privacy. Even before you get to this $10 billion bribe, it’s easily one of the ugliest examples of corruption and U.S. tech policy dysfunction we’ve ever seen.

I like to convince myself history will not be kind.

Filed Under: autocrats, billionaires, corruption, donald trump, larry ellison, national security, privacy, propaganda, social media, video

Companies: bytedance, mgx, oracle, silver lake, tiktok