Comment by slt2021
1 day ago
if US government says who is allowed to buy and buyers collude (by pooling financial and political capital together) they can easily not fight a bidding war and lowball instead
1 day ago
if US government says who is allowed to buy and buyers collude (by pooling financial and political capital together) they can easily not fight a bidding war and lowball instead
Can you give an example of how the most eligible buyers might collude in a way that benefits them all equally, so that this would happen?
For me, it's very hard to conceive of any concrete way that would work. It's a brand, some partnerships, and a network of users that would all go to whatever buyer, and would give that buyer a huge benefit over their existing domestic competitors. So under what circumstances would those domestic competitors allow that instead of aggresively trying to secure it for themselves?
I'm open to believing you, I just don't see what you have in mind.
Why do they need to benefit all equally?
Campaign with the president, offer large amounts of money to the presidents campaign, donate huge sums to a small inauguration party, and then just be picked to get it at a deep discount. The entire point of bribes is that corruption let's you get away with things at a lesser cost. You just screw over everyone else except for the bribe receiver.
only very few rich people can mobilize financial and political capital to pull off tiktok purchase.
Larry Ellison (since he is CIA/MIC friendly and tiktok is already running on Oracle cloud)
Zuck has too much conflict to acquire tiktok, but other oligarchs like Musk/bezos/gates can pull it off, given their recent meetings with Trump
> only very few rich people can mobilize financial and political capital to pull off tiktok purchase
Why do you assume only a natural person can buy TikTok? Why do you assume you need political capital?
The law doesn’t provide that much executive deference in enforcement.
6 replies →
> if US government says who is allowed to buy
It doesn’t. The courts do. TikTok could be sold to a Hungarian businessman. As long as it can’t be proved they aren’t controlled by China, they should be allowed to reënter app stores.
Are the courts not US government? Do you think there isn't any collusion between Supreme Court and the other branches of government?
> Are the courts not US government?
Generally speaking, we tend to refer to governments in countries with independent judiciaries as being separate from their courts. The same way we refer to the government in parliamentary democracies separately from their parliaments. (Or governments separately from a country’s people, even though one is a subset of the other.)
> Do you think there isn't any collusion between Supreme Court and the other branches of government?
Not super relevant here. This SCOTUS barely upheld the ban with Bytedance as the owner.
How would that collusion work?
syndication. Pool political and financial capital together to win the bidding from smaller less connected buyers, and share the final ownership
That seems like it would work, but how would they portion out the final ownership? Maybe the person who bid the most could get the most shares?
1 reply →