TikTok CEO Shou Chew met with President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week, according to NBC News, as the company comes down to the wire in its efforts to thwart a law that would ban the app in the U.S. unless it divests from its Chinese ownership.
Trump gestured vaguely in the direction of steps his administration could take to stave off the looming ban, saying, “We’ll take a look at TikTok” and peddling some self-aggrandizing lies about how the app supposedly helped him win young people by a wide margin in this year’s presidential election (Trump lost voters under 29 by 11 percentage points).
If Trump ultimately does play a role in preventing the TikTok ban from going into effect, expect the move to be portrayed as some last-minute heroics. But it seems more likely that it would come as the result of some serious schmoozing by TikTok investors.
Chew — who, according to The Wall Street Journal, reached out to Elon Musk back in November to gauge Trump’s willingness to avert the ban — isn’t the only one trying to win over the incoming president.
Another TikTok stakeholder who has Trump’s ear is SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, who stood alongside Trump at a Monday news conference where the CEO promoted what he described as a multibillion-dollar investment in the U.S. over the next four years. (SoftBank made a similar commitment during Trump’s first presidency, which yielded mixed results.) As Axios suggests, Son’s investment announcement could come in handy very soon:
Consider this SoftBank’s version of an inaugural donation, in the pursuit of a lighter regulatory touch for the firm and its portfolio companies. For example, SoftBank has a stake in TikTok parent company ByteDance.
And then there’s Jeff Yass, the uber-wealthy Republican financier and TikTok investor whose support for Trump’s election bid has been framed as another potential way to get TikTok on Trump’s good side.
All this is to say: Trump’s about-face on TikTok — an app whose ban he once supported — seems more connected to how many rich supporters of the app have his ear than anything else.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.