TikTok vs the U.S.A. | A Ticking Clock | 4

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Biden signs a law giving ByteDance until January 2025 to divest from TikTok or the app will be banned in the United States. TikTok decides to fight the law in court. Then the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. But the company’s best hope to overturn the law lies in the outcome of the 2024 election — or so it thinks.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of business wars TikTok versus the USA early and ad-free right now.
0:07.6	Join Windry Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:14.9	It's April 24th, 2024 in Los Angeles.
0:22.8	A TikTok employee files into a conference room in the company's U.S. headquarters.
0:27.3	Several other employees follow behind him.
0:29.9	He nods to a coworker.
0:32.0	Terrible day.
0:34.3	Awful.
0:35.4	I feel like I'm walking toward the guillotine.
0:38.8	Just hours ago, President Biden signed a law that gives TikTok's parent company Bight Dance
0:44.5	approximately nine months to sell, where the app will be banned in the United States.
0:50.7	TikTok's CEO, Shozzi Chu, has called an all-hand meeting to discuss what the law means.
0:57.0	To many employees, this feels like the culmination of a long battle.
1:02.0	For years, politicians in Washington have railed against the app, calling it a danger to national security,
1:08.0	and Congress passed this new law by a wide margin. The employee has already been
1:13.6	working on his resume. Originally from China, he's in the United States on a work visa.
1:18.6	If TikTok gets banned and he loses his job, he'll only have two months to find a new job,
1:25.6	or his visa will be revoked. And a deal to sell TikTok
1:29.3	would be complicated and difficult to complete within the mandated 270 days. The Chinese government
1:35.6	has said it will block a sale of TikTok's recommendation algorithm, which is seen as TikTok's secret
1:41.1	sauce and central to its success. All this makes the employee fairly certain a sale won't go through, and the app will be banned,
1:50.0	putting him out of a job.
	...

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