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It's a distinction without a difference. Musk is effectively an agent of the state, with billions in subsidies he wants to protect, and a Chinese auto market he
by rchaud 2y ago
It's a distinction without a difference. Musk is effectively an agent of the state, with billions in subsidies he wants to protect, and a Chinese auto market he is desperate to be allowed into.
The CCP would not miss out on taking advantage of the situation and demanding trade concessions for agreeing to sell. US government would absolutely be involved in raising the necessary finance, as banks won't be bending over backwards to lend Musk money for another speculative venture.
- absolutelastone 2y agoI don't see why any of this must be so. Couldn't they just move or sell to any other country on the planet not on the adversary list? Congress doesn't appear to care if TikTok survives or not. TikTok bans are not news.
- kelnos 2y agoThey could, but why would they want to? Consider: * If ByteDance divests their US TikTok operations, they create a new competitor that could potentially out-compete them in other (non-US, non-Chinese) markets. * Whatever amount of money they get for this divestiture would be much lower than what the business is worth to ByteDance (when your options are sell or shut down, potential buyers will not feel the need to bid high). * ByteDance's US TikTok operations are certainly of non-financial value to the Chinese government. That value is likely orders of magnitude higher than their financial value to ByteDance. Selling that user base is probably not preferable to shutting down. Influence campaigns are certainly easier to run on a platform you own, but certainly those campaigns are already running on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Why add another platform that they can't control where they have to run influence campaigns?