Could Fox News and the social video juggernaut TikTok soon share common ownership?
President Trump suggested Sunday that they will.
Trump, in an interview with Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy on the debut episode of his series The Sunday Briefing, was asked about the pending deal talks around TikTok, which is currently controlled by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance.
Trump has delayed a pending ban of the app, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Biden, instead using the app as a point of negotiation with China. Recent reports have connected Oracle, led by Larry Ellison, as well as the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and the private equity firm Silver Lake (which controls WME), as among the entities in the new ownership group proposed by the U.S.
Trump, however, seems to be adding Fox or the Murdochs into that mix.
“They’re very well known people, and Larry Ellison’s one of them. He’s involved. He’s great guy. Michael Dell is involved,” Trump said (Dell is a significant shareholder in Silver Lake). “I hate to tell you this, but a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? It’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch.
“And Rupert is probably going to be in the group, I think they’re going to be in the group, a couple of others, really great people, very prominent people,” Trump continued. “And they are also American patriots. They love this country, so I think they are going to do a really good job.”
A deal for a piece of TikTok would be enormously consequential, taking what has been the biggest emerging threat to the major tech giants and putting it in the hands of other American companies. Ellison, of course, helped bankroll his son David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount Global, with the younger Ellison seeking to leverage tech to build a bona fide media empire.
The Murdochs, meanwhile, would get some redemption themselves, following the disastrous purchase of MySpace in 2005, which came right as Facebook was emerging as a dominant social platform. News Corp. purchased MySpace for $580 million, but sold it six years later for $35 million.
Of course, TikTok is no MySpace. It is worth billions, and it is growing at a pace that has caught the eye of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.
Under the control of the Ellisons, Murdochs, and PE and VC giants, TikTok may yet have more runway to go.