TikTok's (Sorta) American Owners

TikTok deal signed: A coalition of investors from Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake has agreed to buy TikTok and run an American version of the company, separate from ByteDance’s ownership.

“The deal is aimed at helping TikTok comply with a federal law, which banned the app in the United States in January out of concern that Beijing could use it to gain access to Americans’ sensitive data or to spread propaganda,” reports The New York Times. President Donald Trump “has delayed enforcement of the ban repeatedly. The Thursday order gives negotiators until mid-January to finalize the deal.”

MGX is technically not American; it’s an investment firm that was established by the government of Abu Dhabi in 2024. Emiratis tend to have very strong ties with China. But who’s counting?

With an American user base of 170 million—half the population—Trump’s initial impulse to untether the app from its Chinese owners always seemed reasonable enough to me. One-fifth of Americans report regularly getting their news from TikTok nowadays. Pew Research Center reports that “43% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news there, up from 9% in 2020.” But it’s not clear that part-Emirati owners will be all that much better, or that the Trump administration’s frequent insistence on meddling in private business affairs sets a good precedent.

Comey indicted: Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey, the man who spent many years of his life investigating whether Russian operatives illegally influenced Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Per The New York Times, “Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.” Apparently, “prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia…found insufficient evidence to support charges but were overruled by Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist handpicked by the president to run the office a few days ago.”

Scenes from New York: New York City charter schools will be stripped of millions in funding, per a Trump administration announcement earlier this week, due to their refusal to follow federal civil rights law, specifically on policies for transgender students and the adoption of “biology-based definitions of the words male and female.”

“The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights had given New York City Schools, Chicago Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia until Tuesday to agree to stop giving students access to locker rooms and restrooms corresponding with their gender identity or risk losing funding for specialty magnet schools,” reports NBC News. The New York schools failed to do so, and the city is pursuing possible litigation—trapping Mayor Eric Adams, who has been a bit squishy on this issue, at times appeasing the ultra-progressives, at other times siding with the Trump administration, squarely in the middle.

“These are public schools, funded by hardworking American families, and parents have every right to expect an excellent education—not ideological indoctrination masquerading as `inclusive’ policy,’” said a department spokeswoman following the announcement.

• “President Trump said he would block Israel from annexing the West Bank, issuing a new ultimatum to head off a move that other Western and Middle Eastern powers warned could further inflame regional tensions and jeopardize Israel’s normalized ties with some Arab nations,” reports The Wall Street Journal. 
• How much will lawmakers approve in spending to protect themselves at work?
• From Robert Pondiscio, a perfect takedown of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy: “A closer look at primals research offers a key to understanding how a seemingly healthy distrust of the world and humanity might paradoxically fail to make children safer or happier.” The whole thing is worth a read.
• “President Donald Trump announced a fresh round of tariffs on pharmaceuticals, heavy trucks and furniture, including a 100% duty on patented drugs unless the producer is building a manufacturing plant in the US,” reports Bloomberg. This will hit at the start of October. “The actual comment from the President is direct but its impact may be somewhere between nebulous and negligible,” Mizuho Securities health-care specialist Jared Holz told Bloomberg. “All major players have some production presence domestically and almost all have announced increased investment directly tied towards local manufacturing.” The devil’s going to be in the enforcement details, and it’s unclear how much of an impact this will actually have.
• “NATO officials believe Russia is deliberately testing the alliance’s defenses—and its political will—with a wave of escalating provocations,” reports Axios. So far this month, Russian drones have lingered in Polish and Romanian airspace, and three fighter jets flew into Estonian airspace with transponders off. Clusters of drones lingered in Danish airspace, forcing airport closures earlier this week, but it’s not clear who is responsible for the provocation.
• Some of the new artificial intelligence products seem…profoundly boring—like visual elevator music. I don’t want to waste more time, nor do I want to scroll through dull, clearly unreal short-form videos. I have no time to watch a bear and an alligator-monster boxing underwater, do you? The vibes are shit!

Excited to share Vibes — a new feed in the Meta AI app for short-form, AI-generated videos. pic.twitter.com/iVMa86Li7s

— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) September 25, 2025

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