Donald Trump is constantly confounding Wall Street, of course, as he is most people. Nearly four years into his reign, he really has become the disrupter he promised he would be, although not in the good way that people in Silicon Valley talk about “disrupters.”
His latest affront to the sensibilities of the people who make money from money for a living is his inexplicable intervention into TikTok, the Chinese-owned social-video app that’s captivated the attention of millions of young Americans. Under Trump’s bizarre claim of national security—what could be more threatening than adolescents dancing in coordinated ways?—he is in the process of forcing TikTok’s U.S. business into a shotgun marriage with the likes of Oracle and Walmart, of all companies, and initially tried to take a fee for the Treasury while doing so. (That fee has morphed, at the moment, into a $5 billion, patriotism-promoting “education” fund if TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, is able to complete an IPO.) Of all the crazy things that Trump has done in this, the most intemperate and embarrassing of American presidencies, this is the one that really has Wall Streeters scratching their heads, out of mystification more than anything else.
And that’s from Wall Streeters willing to talk about what Trump is up to with TikTok—and most aren’t. One prominent M&A banker, who has had his hand in some of the biggest M&A deals of all time, declined to comment about the TikTok deal. “It’s just not a situation I’ve followed other than casually,” he said, “so don’t really have anything to add.” Another senior M&A banker, who usually has a lot to say, was also surprisingly quiet about TikTok. “Have to deal with a lot of stuff today,” he emailed, curtailing the conversation. Said one more, exasperated: “POTUS now stands for Piece of Total Utter Shit.” Another, a recently retired M&A banker, at first had little to say about the TikTok deal and then emailed: “Trump is a pussy for letting the deal happen…He blinked and handed the company to his pal Larry [Ellison at Oracle]. He had a legitimate gripe with China and still couldn’t finish.”
Now we were getting somewhere. But I needed to know more. Just what is Trump up to with TikTok? Finally I found a longtime M&A macher who has spent years doing tech deals and was willing to chat (without, of course, being quoted by name). He said that, first and foremost, Trump’s bizarre vendetta against TikTok is his way of getting back at the Americans who used TikTok to make him look stupid at his June rally in Tulsa—his first of the COVID era and the one after which former presidential candidate Herman Cain died of the virus. “There was a whole group on TikTok that all together bought out all the tickets or signed up for the tickets that didn’t cost anything, so no one turned up for the rally and Trump looked like a fucking buffoon,” he said.
He agreed with the retired M&A banker that the TikTok deal, such as it is, is designed to help Trump and his business-exec friends, among them Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook; Ellison, the chairman of Oracle; and Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart. He said the TikTok deal helps Trump with his reelection efforts. How so? I wonder, since pissing off young voters six weeks before the election does not seem like the greatest strategy.
Trump helps himself by helping Zuckerberg, he explained. But how is Zuck involved with the TikTok deal? He said if TikTok gets shut down in the U.S.—or stymied—the beneficiary will be Facebook. (Same if the president successfully shuts down Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat, a Trump directive that has been stayed by a federal judge.) “TikTok is the only competition that Facebook has had in, I don’t know, 10 years or maybe ever, and Facebook can’t buy them,” he said, adding that TikTok would never want to sell to Facebook and that it is probably too big for Facebook to buy. “There are very, very few entrepreneurs now that want to sell to Facebook, just given what a stain on society they are,” he continued. “So if you can’t beat them, then you kill them.” He believes that Zuckerberg “got Trump all riled up about how this is a major national security issue” and is “playing to his racism,” while “Zuck is doing everything he can to shut them down.” He pointed me to Zuckerberg’s July testimony before Congress, alongside the other titans of tech, when he said that it was important that America protect itself from Chinese interlopers trying to steal our data. “It was a real ‘wrap yourself in the flag’-type moment for him,” he said. “The great irony in that is the data that TikTok has is peanuts,” he added. “What do they have? Videos of kids running around doing some shitty dance. Who cares?”