Are you a current TikTok user, or were you waiting for the China-founded company to be sold before signing on?
If you were waiting, are you anxious to sign up now that the sale has happened?
You may want to wait. Over the weekend, I saw a lot of negative posts about TikTok’s change of privacy policies. Not being a TikTok user, I don’t know how drastically the policies have changed or whether they’re much different from those of other social media companies.
But Dean Lyulkin, a Registered Investment Advisor and founder of The Dean’s List and Cardiff, a leading small-business lender, urges caution.
Lyulkin says:
“When President Trump was inaugurated a year ago, it marked something that has only become clearer since. Big tech does not fight power; it is power. The TikTok deal is the clearest illustration yet. For years, we were told TikTok was an existential threat to national security, children’s brains, and democracy itself. Now the solution is a corporate reshuffle. Create a U.S. subsidiary, adjust ownership, add some patriotic compliance language, and suddenly the danger goes poof. Same app. Same algorithm. Different people getting paid.
“Nothing about the underlying risk has changed. What changed is who captures the upside. Start with Larry Ellison. Oracle already hosts TikTok’s U.S. data, and this structure turns Oracle into a permanent toll booth on one of the most valuable attention highways ever created. That is not a security fix. That is an annuity.
“Then you get to the financial owners. Firms like General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Jeff Yass, and Susquehanna International Group. That’s all politically active capital, financially sophisticated, perfectly positioned to survive and profit from a deal that pretends to be about safety.
“That is the comedy of it. If TikTok were truly too dangerous to exist, a Delaware filing would not fix it. But once the cash flows are redirected to the right shareholders, the threat suddenly becomes negotiable. This is how modern governance works. And the biggest danger TikTok ever posed was not the algorithm. It was who was collecting the rent.”
