How to invest in TikTok
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown
It’s the hottest app on earth. Some parents hate it. Some parents don’t even have a clue about how much time their kids are actually spending on it. Either way, it’s become the soundtrack to the pandemic era for anyone with children in their household. An inescapable din. An endless choreography session.
Facebook sees TikTok as the biggest threat to Instagram since Snapchat’s early days. They managed to subdue Snap by incorporating stories into IG, effectively mimicking the service and rolling it out to their entire user base to blunt whatever edge the upstart may have had. They’re going to do the same thing now to TikTok with what they’re calling “Reels.” They’ll employ the exact same anti-competitive behavior that Mark Zuckerberg spent the day testifying to Congress about this week…
WSJ:
Facebook Inc.’s Instagram has offered financial incentives to TikTok users with millions of followers to persuade them to use a new competing service, an escalation in a high-stakes showdown between the two social-media giants.
Instagram has made lucrative offers to some of TikTok’s most popular creators to use the new service, Reels, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook is planning to unveil Reels next month. The potential payments for some would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of the people said.
TikTok may have already gotten too big to be stopped by sheer mimicry. It has a valuation on the private market of up to $100 billion, dwarfing the size of Snap when it finally came public. An IPO is likely. But will US investors get a chance to be involved?
This is the subject of the latest edition of my podcast, which dropped this morning. I hope you like it!
You can listen to the embed below or play it on your favorite podcast app, click here for Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher.
Special thanks to my guest Brendan Ahern of KraneShares, make sure you check out his daily China Last Night note here.
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Ilene here: Friday night, The Hill reports:
President Trump on Friday said he plans to ban the social media platform TikTok from operating in the United States. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
The president said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order as early as Saturday to officially bar the Chinese-owned company from the U.S. He signaled he was not supportive of allowing an American company to acquire TikTok…"
Comedian Sarah Cooper lip-syncs Trump:
How to tick tack pic.twitter.com/1Mn8nk363f
— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 31, 2020
