Aus
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/08/tiktok-how-the-white-house-helped-us-investors-to-raid-a-chinese-company.html#more
In 2017 the Chinese company ByteDance bought the Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion deal and relaunched under the name TikTok.
The app allows its users to create and share short videos with special effects.
It was a great success and the app now has more than 80 million active users in the U.S. alone.
The Chinese version Douyin is separate and has even more.
ByteDance has other apps, mostly in the Chinese market, that also generate advertising revenues.
The company is valuated at some $140 billion.
The TikTok part is valuated at at least $50 billion.
Some 70% of the ByteDance outside investors are U.S. private equity firms.
At one point these U.S. investors decided to raid the successful business.
The White House found that to be a great idea and actively supported the plan.
The company was put under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
That made little sense as neither ByteDance nor TikTok planned to acquire a U.S. company.
The published reason was that Chinese access to user data of TikTok might have national security implications.
That made little sense.
TikTok does not collect user data beyond what is needed to run the application and to share the videos.
Its Chief Executive Officer is an American citizen.
The user data is stored in the U.S. and TikTok has hired nearly 1,000 people for its U.S. team and is looking for more.
The Chinese government is unlikely to have interest in the preferred video motives of U.S. Teens. (…)
The whole TikTok robbery has of course nothing to do with national security or with access to TikTok user data.
The NSA surely already has such access while the Chinese government has no plausible interest in it.
This is purely a raid against a Chinese company to rob it of a successful part of its business.
This raid was carried out by U.S. investors with intensive help from the U.S. government.
We can be sure that other Chinese companies – and the ‘lying communists’ in the Chinese government – will learn from it.