Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m back at home after a
one-night mandatory evacuation. Welcome back to In the Room. This has been a surreal few days, to say the least, and I’m grateful to all of you who have reached out over the last 48 hours. And, once again, immense thanks to all the incredible reporters and production crews who have been on the front lines—and, of course, the firefighters.
In tonight’s email, my partner Tara Palmeri
assesses the implications of the impending TikTok ban, which the Supreme Court appears likely to uphold after hearing arguments on Friday. If so, it may present Trump with a golden opportunity to swoop in and consummate the ultimate deal—though probably not with Frank McCourt and Kevin O’Leary.
But first…
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- 🍸 The Grill Room: On today’s edition of the podcast, my dear friend, partner, and Puck co-founder Jon Kelly returns to chew over the latest developments on the media landscape: Will Lewis’s Washington Post fantasies, Emma Tucker’s Wall Street Journal growth, Mark Thompson’s CNN strategy, and the impending A.I. newsroom revolution. Plus, some NFL playoff predictions. Follow on
Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Venu’s end: Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros.
Discovery have scrapped plans to launch Venu, their long-awaited sports streaming joint venture. This has been described as a “shocking reversal,” since Disney just neutered Fubo’s legal challenge last week via a merger. On the other hand, most media executives I talk to have been skeptical about Venu launching ever since it was first
announced (back when we called it “Spulu”). It was always an incomplete offering, with an overly complicated corporate arrangement, and vulnerable to legal pressure from competitors.
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- Post problems, cont’d: The Wall Street Journal’s Alex Bruell has unearthed another dispiriting data point regarding The Washington Post: Ad revenue fell last year—an election year—from $190 million to $174 million. And so the already vast chasm between the
Post’s current predicament and Jeff Bezos’s ambitions for financial success has become just a little bit wider. Good luck, Will. (In case you missed it, I wrote about the Post’s plans earlier this week.)
- Zuck’s Meta narratives: On the heels of his decision to
end fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and blamed media pressure around the 2016 election for his initial decision to introduce fact-checking on ideological grounds. “In 2016 and the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, ‘Okay, there’s no way [Trump] could have got elected except for misinformation.’” Over time, Zuck said that the third-party
fact-checkers began to demonstrate too much political bias: “It’s something out of 1984,” he said, “it really is a slippery slope.” Zuck also noted that “trust in media has fallen off a cliff” since 2016. “The stuff that’s being written about is not all accurate, and even if the facts are right it’s kind of being written from a slant a lot of the time.”
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Seduced by a lobbying charm offensive and fearful of losing a
powerful new media platform, the man who once called TikTok a national security threat has become its most important advocate—stirring wannabe buyers, back-channeling with the app’s C.E.O., and entranced by the prospect of the ultimate deal.
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While Washington braces for Inauguration Day, when
Donald Trump will take the oath of office on the Capitol steps, Trump himself has become fixated on the day before: January 19, the deadline for TikTok to find a U.S. buyer or face a countrywide ban. Trump, who previously led the charge to ban the app, has recently become enamored with saving it, preserving a platform that has developed a sizable MAGA-friendly audience and doing a solid for the friends and allies who have an economic interest in keeping TikTok alive.
With the Supreme Court deliberating over the arguments it heard Friday regarding whether to overturn or delay the law—which provides the sitting president with the ability to institute a 90-day freeze if he’s in the process of facilitating a “qualified divestiture”—Trump recognizes a golden opportunity to swoop in and consummate the ultimate deal.
Just as importantly, perhaps, postponing the
TikTok ban would preserve yet another platform on which to simulcast Trump’s triumphant return. It’s a pitch that savvy TikTok executives, lobbyists, and emissaries—including Trump allies Kellyanne Conway, David Urban, Johnny McEntee, Brian Ballard, and Charlie Kirk—have made directly and explicitly to the president-elect in recent weeks. “They’re spoon-feeding this to Trump,” said a source involved in the
lobbying effort. “They’re highlighting to him just how big TikTok is for him and his people, and how, if TikTok is shut down on January 19, none of the views will be on the inauguration. That resonated with him.” Among the suitors has been Shou Zi Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, who met with the president-elect on December 16 bearing charts showing Trump’s popularity on the app (“36 billion total views of #trump,” etcetera). Trump loved them so much that he Truthed them.
The pro-TikTok brigade has successfully appealed to Trump’s vanity in other ways, too. Trump and Chew again spoke by phone on December 27, according to a source with knowledge of the call, the same day Trump filed an amicus brief calling for a 90-day stay. According to the argument filed with the court, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate
a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.” Notably, Trump’s attorney John Sauer—who also argued his criminal immunity case before SCOTUS—didn’t really address the First Amendment question. Instead, he writes that the court should “stay the statute’s effective date” to “allow his incoming Administration to pursue a negotiated resolution.” In other words: I alone can fix it.
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Even before Joe Biden signed the April 2024 law
requiring the app be banned or sold, TikTok argued that its platform was fairer to Trump than Meta or Twitter, both of which had blocked him after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. But a more curated charm offensive began last spring, when TikTok officials started publicizing numbers showing that the app hosted twice as much pro-Trump content as pro-Biden. The campaign
to win over Trump, who’d previously declared TikTok a national security threat, began to yield dividends. Trump joined the app in June 2024, in the heat of the presidential race. His account has 14.7 million followers, nearly twice as many as Kamala Harris’s.
Where Trump once viewed the app as a Chinese Trojan horse, he now sees it as another virtual home for his base and a tool to convert the
Trump-curious. “I’m now a big star on TikTok,” he posted on Truth Social in September. “We’re not doing anything with TikTok but the other side’s going to close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump. If you don’t care about TikTok—and other things like safety, security and prosperity—then you can vote for a Marxist who’s going to destroy our country.”
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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ANORA IS THE MOST ACCLAIMED FILM OF THE YEAR.
Awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival,
it was crowned The Best Movie of 2024 in Indiewire’s poll of 177 critics.
It is now nominated for 3 SAG Awards and 7 Critics Choice Awards
including
BEST PICTURE, BEST ACTRESS, AND BEST DIRECTOR.
A culmination of twenty-five years of filmmaking from writer/director/editor Sean Baker, nominated for the Outstanding Directorial Achievement (Feature Film) DGA Award, ANORA is a film that ”reaffirms
that movies are still capable of generating miracles.” (Rolling Stone)
Anchored by an electrifying Mikey Madison who delivers “the performance of the year” (Awards Radar), ANORA is a timeless and unforgettable cinematic experience.
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In conversations with six sources close to Trump, the consensus
was that he wants to save the app, but hasn’t settled on how to do it. That’s keeping TikTok executives and potential buyers up at night. “Trump is solution-agnostic,” said an incoming senior Trump official. If the Supreme Court delays the ban, the executives are hopeful Trump could save the app by executive order—something I’m told Trump’s legal team is investigating. Another, more nuclear option would be for Trump to order his attorney general not to enforce the ban.
The more permanent, ByteDance-friendly alternative would be to devise a new ownership structure that allows the Chinese to keep their financial stake in TikTok while adding a U.S. corporate partner. Since 2022, TikTok has been routing all its U.S. user data through Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in an attempt to reassure lawmakers who are concerned about China’s access to private information. TikTok executives are hoping Trump
could take that arrangement a step further by reviving “Project Texas,” a deal first proposed in 2020, which would give Oracle and Walmart a combined 20 percent stake in TikTok. ByteDance would keep the TikTok algorithm and 80 percent of the company, while the newly constituted “TikTok Global” would promise to go public, hire 25,000 U.S. workers, and pour $5 billion into the U.S. Treasury. So far, however, members of Congress are unconvinced this sleight-of-hand would address concerns about
Beijing’s access to U.S. user data.
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“Peacockers & Masqueraders”
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Of course, the best outcome for potential buyers would be if
ByteDance could be induced by Trump to sell the company to a U.S. consortium, delivering TikTok and its immense financial value into American hands and securing its growth on the bedrock of Delaware law. Another pitch being made to Trump—by a handful of billionaires including former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary—is that a group of American investors should buy the company outright from ByteDance, with Trump’s backing, as part of a
trade deal. Under this proposed solution, Trump would use the threat of tariffs to pressure China to sell, an approach in line with Trump’s international negotiating technique and already a subject of discussion with Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. (Bessent, too, has met with Chew.) One source with knowledge of this thinking described the advantage for Trump this way: “Trump will say, ‘I will help find an American buyer.’ He can be the hero and say he
helped an American find the money.”
Farfetched? Maybe. President Xi Jinping faces his own domestic pressures not to be seen capitulating to a foreign rival, especially amid sluggish economic growth and a rising hypernationalist mood. But other U.S. trading partners including Canada and Mexico have already responded to Trump’s tariff threats with performative gestures designed to
appease, distract, or offer up quick and cosmetic wins. A proponent of this route who has knowledge of the discussions told me: “The chances of China doing a deal was at 0 percent, and now we think it’s at 30 percent,” in exchange for Trump offering “less punitive economic agreements on tariffs.”
Meanwhile, potential investors are trying to reach Trump through the press—which explains why Shark
Tank co-host O’Leary was on Fox this week speaking directly to the president-elect. “Trump will be who we have to work with to close the deal in the months ahead,” he said. “So I wanted to let him know, as well as others in his cabinet, that we’re doing this, and we’re going to need their help.” (The last time O’Leary was at Mar-a-Lago, he was talking up the fantasy of making Canada the 51st state.)
On Thursday,
McCourt and O’Leary announced “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” calling it a “a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Americans to reclaim a voice, choice, and stake in the future of the internet.” McCourt has supposedly secured about $20 billion in commitments from private equity, but at the end of the day, it’s unclear what the platform is worth without its vaunted algorithm—the secret sauce that has made
the app so addictive. And not all of McCourt and O’Leary’s peers think they are particularly serious contenders, even if the two men are clearly serious about the bid, themselves. “No one in the incoming administration is talking to us about a sale,” a source working for TikTok told me. “These billionaires who are going around saying they are going to buy TikTok are nothing but peacockers and masqueraders.”
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Finally, a media podcast about what’s actually happening in the media—not the oversanitized,
legal-and-standards-approved version you read online. Join Dylan Byers, Puck’s veteran media reporter, as he sits down with TV personalities, moguls, pundits, and industry executives for raw, honest, sometimes salacious conversations about the business of media and its biggest egos. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.
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A professional-grade rundown on the business of sports from John Ourand, the industry’s preeminent journalist,
covering the leagues, players, agencies, media deals, and the egos fueling it all.
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