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As Paramount continues its fight for Warner Brothers, Larry Ellison’s company wants TikTok too
TikTok has signed a deal to spin off its U.S. operations to a group controlled by mostly American investors, including software giant Oracle, a company run by billionaire Larry Ellison, a Florida businessman cozy with President Trump.
Ellison, who is also doing battle along with his son David Ellison at Paramount, for control of Warner Brothers, with the father-son billionaires engaging in a hostile takeover offer that is being rejected by the legendary Hollywood studio, will now own a piece of TikTok.
TikTok announced it has sold 80% of the company’s U.S. assets to American and global investors, with CEO Shou Zi Chew breaking the news to employees on Thursday. The alternative was for the app to be banned in U.S., a push first proposed by Trump and then passed by Congress.
Should all of the Ellison’s efforts prove successful, they would add CNN and TikTok to a portfolio that already includes CBS News, which they acquired as part of their Paramount takeover, leading them to control a significant amount of American news distribution.
“With an American majority running the content moderation, concerns about foreign propaganda seem to have been alleviated,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who studies the regulation of new technology, told NPR. “But it is possible that the American TikTok might end up censoring or hiding speech that is permissible on the global TikTok platform. I would hope that the U.S. content moderation team would allow speech that the American owners might dislike.”
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Michele McPhee
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