• Elon Musk's X — the thing we used to call Twitter — lost lots of advertisers after he bought it.
• Now he is trying to get them back and, reportedly, using the implied threat of government interference to do so.
• This seems like an opportunity for people concerned about government involvement in social media to pipe up. When will that happen?

Here's a 100% hypothetical scenario: Say a Big Tech CEO calls up a big ad agency and tells them it'd be a good idea to spend more money with his company. Because if they don't, he knows people in the US government …

I know, I know. That would never happen.

Except that maybe it has been happening. And the person who is allegedly sending that message is Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X.

Which is, of course, owned by Elon Musk, who works for Donald Trump, donated more than $250 million to Trump's presidential campaign, and also conducts joint interviews with him.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Yaccarino and her lieutenants have been pressing Interpublic Group, one of the world's biggest ad agencies, to get its clients to spend more money on X. Hanging over IPG's head: a proposed deal to sell itself to rival Omnicom, which may need regulatory approval in the US.

IPG execs interpreted X's messaging as a reminder that the Trump administration could slow down that deal, according to the Journal's veteran ad reporter Suzanne Vranica, citing several unnamed people close to the matter.

We're just a month into Trump 2.0, and things are happening very quickly, so it's easy to miss stuff. But I want to underline what could be happening here — because it's extraordinary. Even by the extraordinary standards we've seen established in the past few weeks: A big media platform, whose owner is deeply enmeshed with the Trump administration, is — reportedly — telling companies to give it business, or risk government reprisal.

And if that's true, that goes beyond the performative ring-kissing we've seen from Big Tech and other business leaders in the last few months. And beyond the settlements Trump has extracted from the likes of Disney, Meta, and X itself.

Those payouts stemmed from disputes between private companies and a private citizen who happened to have since become president of the United States. Now we're looking at a world where the president's allies could get special treatment, too. And people or companies who don't bow to those allies could face retribution on government decisions that should be made on their legal merits.

Here's what Interpublic told me when I asked if the Journal's story was correct, which is what it also told the Journal. I'm publishing the response in full:

Our role is to recommend the most strategic media investments to our clients. These objective recommendations maximize business outcomes for brands and audiences. We continually work with a cross-section of media partners and believe a broad range of options delivers the greatest value and efficiency for marketers. We do not make spending commitments on behalf of clients to any partner or platform, and decision-making authority always rests with the client.

You may notice that there's nothing in there arguing that the Journal's reporting — that Interpublic executives believe Yaccarino and Co. were telling it to spend more to keep out of trouble — isn't true.

I'm assuming that wording is very precise and specific. But just to make sure, I followed up to ask if IPG wanted to offer any additional comment. I haven't heard back. I also haven't heard back from the X press office.

And just to beat this into the ground: I also haven't seen any public concern from the Trump allies who regularly complain that media and tech platforms are biased against conservatives, or that they've been too cozy with Democratic lawmakers. You'd think they'd be very upset about suggestions that a big platform used its ties to the president of the United States to coerce advertisers.

But there's been nothing out of Jim Jordan, the Republican congressman who has spent years trying to root out supposed bias in Big Tech, and who now says he's trying to root out supposed collusion between big advertisers to keep ad dollars away from X. (X is also making the same allegations in lawsuits it is filing against several would-be advertisers.) Nothing from Brendan Carr, Trump's choice to run the Federal Communications Commission, who has said he wants to stamp out bias at big media companies and Big Tech companies. Nothing from Vice President JD Vance, who just lectured European leaders over the way they regulate social media while complaining that Joe Biden's administration "threatened and bullied social media companies."

But look. Like I said: This is extraordinary stuff — stuff we would have had a hard time imagining just a few weeks ago. So maybe I'm wrong, and people in Trumpworld are just finding out about these allegations and will be complaining loudly about them any minute now.

Let me know when you hear something.

• For a couple of hours Friday morning, it looked like Apple and Netflix had patched up a frosty relationship.
• Turns out that's not the case. Specifically: Netflix still isn't integrated into Apple's TV app.
• It's worth remembering that Apple and Netflix used to be quite close. But now they're frenemies.

It's my solemn duty to inform you that the Great Apple-Netflix Peace Treaty of 2025 is no more. In fact, it never was.

There are good reasons the sentences above might not make sense to you.

For starters, you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Netflix and Apple, which used to be aligned, have been in a mild cold war for close to a decade. And you probably don't spend a lot of time looking at fevered posts from Redditors who thought they discovered evidence of a Netflix-Apple rapprochement.

Luckily, you've got me. So here's a story about a nonstory that still tells us something about two of the biggest players in media and tech.

On Friday morning, people who use Apple's TV app, and/or Apple's Apple TV set-top box, noticed something strange: If they opened up their Netflix app, they got a prompt telling them to connect Netflix to the Apple TV app. That wouldn't let you watch Netflix within Apple's app. But it was supposed to let Apple tell you what was on Netflix, tell you what you were watching on Netflix, and suggest Netflix shows you might want to watch. I tried it myself and got the same result.

The reason this is notable is that Apple's TV app inhales data about all the streaming services you use — except for Netflix, which has stayed clear of the app since it launched in 2016. So it looked like the two companies had reached some kind of deal. Cue mild excitement:

Alas. There is no Apple-Netflix deal, people at both companies who don't want to be quoted say. Instead, they chalk it up to a software bug. Move along; nothing to see here.

But the (admittedly weird) bug does give us a chance to remind you of the state of affairs between Apple and Netflix, which used to be warm but aren't anymore.

Back in 2010, Netflix was one of the first big video apps to make its way to Apple's iPad. A couple of months later, then-CEO Reed Hastings appeared onstage at an Apple event to show off a Netflix iPhone app — a showcase Apple reserves for its biggest partners.

But six years later, Netflix steered clear of Apple's new TV app — Apple's attempt to create a TV guide for the streaming age.

That omission frustrated Apple TV users, but it made some sense from Netflix's point of view: At the time, Netflix was the clear leader in the streaming wars. From its point of view, handing over its data to Apple — and letting Apple display Netflix TV shows and movies alongside other services' shows and movies — seemed like something that would benefit its rivals, but not Netflix.

How Apple and Netflix became frenemies

And over the next few years, Netflix and Apple grew further apart.

In 2018, Netflix stopped selling subscriptions via Apple's platforms because it didn't want to pay Apple's App Store fees. And in 2019, when Apple launched a new version of its TV app, which sold subscriptions to other companies' streaming services, Netflix opted out of that, too.

"Apple's a great company. We want to have people watch our shows on our services," Hastings said. Not coincidentally: This was also when Apple launched its own streaming service, which made it and Netflix formal competitors for the first time.

Since then, the two companies have been frenemies. They run rival streamers, but Netflix's presence on Apple hardware is important to both companies.

Which, on the one hand, made it seem plausible that the two companies had figured out a way to work together in 2025. On the other hand: Why would they?

Netflix is now the definitive winner of the streaming wars, which should give it even more leverage in its relationship with Apple and everyone else. Apple, meanwhile, seems primarily focused on its own streamer, and getting it onto as many platforms as possible — like it did this week when it finally launched on Google's Android phones.

So maybe one day these two companies will find a way to work together again. But they don't seem in a hurry to make it happen anytime soon.

• Brendan Carr, Donald Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, is investigating Comcast.
• Carr says he's concerned about Comcast's embrace of DEI.
• This is just one of several media companies Trump and his administration have either sued or investigated.

After this past fall's election, Brendan Carr — Donald Trump's choice to head the Federal Communications Commission — said he'd be going after big media companies.

He is keeping his word.

On Tuesday, Carr told Comcast — the giant cable and broadband company that also owns media properties including NBC, Peacock, and the Universal film and TV studio — that he's going to start investigating the company to make sure it's not promoting "discrimination in violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws."

We can get back to Carr's letter in a minute. But the big picture here is most important: In the fall, Carr, who at the time was an FCC commissioner, announced that he'd be scrutinizing big media companies once he started running the agency.

Now he's doing that.

Earlier this month, his agency compelled CBS to hand over transcripts and video from a "60 Minutes" interview it ran with Kamala Harris in October, ostensibly because it's concerned about "news distortion." This is the same interview that's the focus of a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CBS's owner, Paramount, which Paramount is now trying to settle. That lawsuit is theoretically separate from the FCC approval Paramount's owner, Shari Redstone, needs to sell her company to David and Larry Ellison. In the real world, the two seem very intertwined.

Now Carr has added Comcast to the list of big media companies that need scrutiny. It's worth noting that Trump, while a private citizen, already went after Disney, via a lawsuit he filed last year — and got Disney to settle once he'd been elected. At this point, the only media company I'd be surprised to see Trump and his administration target would be Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corp., which owns Fox News, Trump's favorite channel.

In theory, Carr is scrutinizing Comcast because he thinks it may be violating civil rights laws as "there is substantial evidence that your companies are still engaging in the promotion of DEI," the letter he sent to Comcast this week said. (I've asked Carr for comment, as well as the full text of the note, which was summarized by Newsmax.)

Why does the head of the FCC, which is supposed to enforce communications law, get to weigh in on whether a media conglomerate does or doesn't promote diversity, equity, and inclusion? Carr has an answer: The FCC has oversight of several of Comcast's businesses, from "cable to high-speed internet and from broadcast TV stations" to "wireless offerings." (Carr did not mention Comcast's plan to spin off most of its cable networks, which shouldn't require FCC approval — but could conceivably get held up by a different Trump-appointed regulator.)

In theory, this may be connected to a Trump executive order instructing his agencies "to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences," and for each agency to find "up to nine potential civil compliance investigations" at places like publicly traded companies, nonprofits, and colleges. (Last week, on her first day on the job, US Attorney General Pam Bondi put her office to work on the same task and said she would also look at "criminal investigations" to stop DEI.)

In a statement, Comcast acknowledged it received Carr's letter and said it "will be cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions," adding: "For decades, our company has been built on a foundation of integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers."

But it would be naive to think that Carr is going after Comcast because he has a problem with the company's HR practices alone.

Right before the election, for instance, Carr was complaining about the way Comcast's "Saturday Night Live" used Kamala Harris in a cameo, which he said violated the agency's "equal time" rules. Carr said that could conceivably put the broadcast licenses Comcast owns at risk: "In my view, every single remedy needs to be on the table, at least as an initial matter."

In other words, there seem to be lots of things a big media company can do that will earn the ire of the Trump administration. Maybe it's an interview. Maybe it's a comedy skit. Maybe it's the way they hire and promote people.

And if you're worried that the next thing you do could upset the president of the United States, maybe you'll think carefully before you do that thing. No matter what it is. Which seems to be the point.

• Elon Musk proposed a $97 billion offer to buy part of OpenAI.
• Lots of folks, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, think Musk is more interested in hurting Altman than actually owning OpenAI.
• But when the world's richest man makes an offer — even if you're not sure it's real — you have to at least think about it.

Here is a question you don't normally ask when someone proposes a $97 billion dollar deal: Is that a serious offer, or a troll?

But it's 2025, and the person making the offer is Elon Musk. So that's a very appropriate question.

The deal in question: A $97.375 billion offer from a consortium, led by the world's richest man, to buy at least part of OpenAI.

The mechanics of this theoretical deal get complicated pretty quickly, since OpenAi is a… complicated organization. As is often the case, Matt Levine at Bloomberg has a very useful explainer, but it boils down to this:

• Right now, OpenAI is a nonprofit organization that controls a very valuable business. It's the group that created ChatGPT and other AI properties, and it has even grander plans.
• OpenAI leader Sam Altman wants to convert OpenAI into a for-profit business, and plans on giving the nonprofit part of OpenAI a stake in the for-profit business.
• Musk and his theoretical co-investors argue that this is a sweetheart deal that will short-change OpenAI, the nonprofit company. So they're offering to buy the nonprofit part of OpenAI for "no less than $97.375 billion," per a letter from Marc Toberoff, an attorney representing the Musk coalition. (I've asked both Toberoff and OpenAI for comment.)

When you have to summarize something with three bullet points, it's already pretty complicated. But it gets more complicated from here, because now we have to guess at whether Musk actually plans on doing this.

The conventional wisdom, which quickly coalesced after Musk made his offer on Monday, is no.

That argument mainly hinges on the idea that Musk is simply trying to jam up Altman, his former ally-turned-rival.

As The Wall Street Journal notes: "Musk's offer could force OpenAI's board of directors to reassess how it is valuing the nonprofit, which the board has said will be fairly compensated in the transaction and own a stake in the for-profit. The higher the valuation of the nonprofit, the bigger its stake would likely be in the for-profit OpenAI following a conversion."

That, in turn, will further complicate a giant funding deal that was supposed to value OpenAI at $300 billion; if Musk's offer raises the value of the non-profit part of OpenAI, it changes the calculations for investors in the for-profit part of OpenAI.

Or, in Altman's words: "I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor."

And there are other reasons to raise at least one eyebrow at Musk's offer. The first is Musk's affinity for saying one thing and doing another. Like last March, when he wrote that he was "not donating money to either candidate for US President" — and then went on to donate more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

More specifically, Musk has previously floated deals that either aren't real or that he tried to back out of. Like in 2018, when he said he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private, but he didn't have funding secured, and he didn't take Tesla private. Or in 2022, when he signed a fast-tracked deal to buy Twitter and take it private — and then spent weeks trying to void the deal, saying that he'd been deceived by Twitter's management.

But the flip version of that argument is that betting against Elon Musk doing something is a very dangerous bet.

The standard version of that line is to point to the success of Tesla and SpaceX, two Musk companies that seemed like long-shots when he first engaged with them.

A more recent version is the one Liz Hoffman makes in Semafor: That even Musk's impulse purchase of Twitter, which led to a mass defection by advertisers and plummeting revenue, has actually worked out well. Even if the business itself is a shadow of what it was when Musk bought it, it is now an important political megaphone for Musk. And his investors may end up OK as well, because they're supposed to own a slice of xAI, Musk's own AI company.

I'm not convinced that just because Musk has won in the past doesn't mean you should take him seriously when he says something wild in the present. There's a reason that "past results don't guarantee future performance" is a standard business disclaimer.

But if I were Sam Altman, I'd at least have to game out a future where Musk really does mean what he says.

• Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corp. makes almost all its money from traditional TV.
• But it thinks it can make money from podcasts, too.
• That's why it bought Red Seat Ventures, a podcasting company that works with former Fox News stars.

There are lots of reasons to believe podcasts are newly important in today's political/media environment. Like, say, the world's biggest video company telling you it's really into podcasting.

But if you want real evidence, look for people writing checks to podcast companies. Which is what Rupert Murdoch just did: His Fox Corp. just acquired Red Seat Ventures, a company that helps podcast stars — generally on the right side of the political spectrum — make money.

If "Red Seat Ventures" rings a bell somewhere in the back of your head, it may be because you were reading Business Insider back in November, when I talked to Red Seat Ventures CEO Chris Balfe about the importance of podcasting in the 2024 election.

And/or: Maybe you listened to my "Channels" podcast interview with him. (I got more feedback on that chat than any other show I've done in a while.)

If, for some reason, you missed those, a quick recap: Red Seat handles production and ad sales for a roster of high-profile podcasters, several of whom used to be high-profile Fox News stars but had messy breakups with the cable channel — Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O'Reilly.

Which means Fox is now going to make money from those personalities yet again.

Except that now, instead of employing them, it will make money from them as a vendor. (It may or may not be significant that Red Seat Ventures won't be a part of Fox News itself — instead, it will be housed in Fox Corp.'s digital wing, along with Tubi, its popular and free streaming service.) Fox and Balfe were both mum about a purchase price.

Big picture: Fox's deal is a bet that podcasts — in both audio and video form — are on the upswing. Which is something you hear a bunch from podcasting industry folks these days, following a couple-year trough where the sector dug itself out from high-priced talent deals and acquisitions that didn't work out.

And in Fox's case, it's also a hedge: Maybe the rise of people like Carlson — whose 2023 departure from Fox remains a sort of mystery — as independent talk-show hosts is a threat to Fox News, especially as the channel's audience continues to age.

Or maybe podcasts are simply a nice complementary business to its core TV operation, which will be spitting out billions of dollars a year in profits for a long time.

Either way, Fox wants a piece of it — even if it means working with people it had stopped working with.

• Tubi is a free streaming service owned by Fox Corp.
• It is also very popular with Black viewers, who make up nearly half its audience.
• Tubi doesn't market itself as a Black streaming service. But it also says it's happy to have those viewers.

The Super Bowl is a big event for Tubi, which is streaming the game for free: It's a chance for the service to introduce itself to a huge audience that might know little, or nothing at all, about the Fox-owned streamer.

But if Tubi isn't a household name throughout the US, it definitely has pockets of fandom throughout the country. One particularly big pocket: Black audiences.

Nielsen says nearly half of all viewing — 45% — on Tubi came from Black audiences in December. That's a much bigger percentage of Black viewers than any other streamer — which saw an average Black audience of 19.5% in December — and it's also much bigger than old-line TV — which saw an average 16.4%.

For context: Tubi says it reaches about 100 million monthly users. And it routinely challenges or beats the likes of Peacock, Paramount+, and Max in Nielsen's streaming ratings.

All of which puts Tubi and its corporate parent in a slightly weird spot: It most definitely doesn't position itself publicly as a streamer that appeals to Black audiences. But if you ask company executives about it, they're happy to discuss it.

"We have real momentum with Black audiences, and we're really proud of that," says Tubi CEO Anjali Sud.

So on the one hand, that means Tubi is intentionally looking for movies and TV shows it thinks will appeal to Black viewers. On the other hand, Tubi insists that it's interested in servicing all kinds of niches, like gay and lesbian viewers, or Gen Z viewers.

Tubi's popularity with Black audiences existed before Fox acquired the company for $440 million in March 2020. Farhad Massoudi, Tubi's cofounder and former CEO, didn't set out to make a streamer that appealed to Black viewers. He was just interested in building a streaming service that relied on software and algorithms to tell him what people watched.

"We do have a huge African American audience, and basically, our data showed that there is a big demand from those users, and we decided to lean in," he told me in July 2020.

Sud, who took over Tubi in 2023, says she's continued in the same vein. Tubi has actively tried to buy and develop material it thinks will appeal to Black audiences. But she thinks it can do the same for other audiences: "We believe we can achieve the same kind of resonance with other audiences," she says. "But we got the signal faster with Black audiences."

Tubi's appeal to Black viewers hasn't gone unnoticed by its competitors, some of whom try to turn it into a negative. Talk to folks about Tubi at rival streamers and you'll hear references to "audience quality" — a suggestion that marketers won't pay as much to reach a Tubi viewer.

Sud, not surprisingly, says that's not true: "There's only one metric that matters in terms of quality. That's engagement."

• Some of you still think of podcasts as something you listen to — not things you watch.
• Google would like to disabuse you of that notion: It wants you — and investors — to know that podcasts are increasingly popular on YouTube.
• That's why Google chose to highlight the rise of podcasts during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

YouTube is the biggest video platform in the world. It's central to popular culture. It's a $50 billion business for Google, its parent company.

But Google would like you to know that YouTube is also a place where lots of people listen to — and watch — podcasts.

"YouTube continues to be the leader in streaming watchtime and podcasts," the company noted in its fourth-quarter earnings release on Tuesday. That's a glancing, anodyne statement. But it's also meaningful: I've never seen Google mention podcasting in its messages to Wall Street before.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also mentioned YouTube's embrace of podcasting in his scripted comments at the beginning of the earnings call. So did Philipp Schindler, the company's chief business officer.

To underline this: Companies like Google spend a lot of time figuring out what they do and don't want to highlight during earnings. So, dropping "podcasts" into the messaging isn't a random choice.

It also makes lots of sense. As we noted last fall, Donald Trump leaned heavily into podcasts in the 2024 election — which meant Donald Trump also leaned heavily into YouTube.

That's because increasing numbers of people are using YouTube to consume podcasts — either to actually watch them, like a low-budget TV chat show, or to simply ignore the video and listen to them in the background. Edison Research says YouTube has now become the most popular way for people to consume podcasts, period.

You could see YouTube CEO Neal Mohan leaning into YouTube's new prominence in the political landscape last month when he posted photos of himself at a pre-inauguration party alongside a slew of Trump-friendly podcasters, including Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, and Lex Fridman. (Fridman also got a shout-out during the earnings call.)

But YouTube won't have podcasting and video to itself. Spotify, which has long had video as an option for its podcasters, is trying hard to get some of its highest-profile podcasters to become video stars as well.

• Apple is complaining about a porn app that's now available for European iPhone users.
• But the complaint isn't really about porn — it's about European rules meant to unlock its control of its app store.
• That's one of many EU regulations Big Tech hopes Trump will fight — possibly with tariffs.

How do Apple, porn, and Donald Trump end up in the same story?

Glad you asked. It's a tiny bit complicated, but I'm here to serve.

Big picture: Apple is complaining about a porn app that's now available on iPhones, against its wishes, because of European regulations it hates.

Those regulations are among the many complaints Big Tech companies have about the way Europe treats them. And they're hoping that Trump, their newfound ally, will fight back against them — maybe using the same tariff/threat strategy he has been employing against Canada, Mexico, and China.

The details: Apple is grousing about Hot Tub, a new app available to iPhone users in the European Union. You can't get it from Apple's own app store, but it's available from AltStore, an alternative app store that lets users "sideload" apps to their phones. AltStore works because of new EU regulations — bitterly opposed by Apple — that allow for third-party app stores.

On the porn part: I haven't used Hot Tub myself, but from what I understand, it lets you … look at porn. Just like anyone with an iPhone can already do using Apple's Safari browser.

But Apple thinks there's a big distinction since Apple (like Google) has long banned porn apps from the app store it runs. And it's particularly upset that Hot Tub and AltStore have suggested that the new app is "Apple-approved." (The distinction: Though Apple hates the new third-party app stores it has to work with, it still gets to conduct basic supervision of the apps that show up in app stores like AltStore. In Apple's eyes, signing off on an app for someone else's app store is very different from approving it for its own app store.)

All of this comes as a result of a drawn-out fight involving Apple and a handful of developers, including Epic Games, that have complained about Apple's app store rules and EU regulators. I've written about this — and the importance of the App Store to Apple's overall business — a bunch. I'd also suggest reading Shira Ovide's excellent plain-English explainer in The Washington Post.

What Big Tech wants from Donald Trump

And the reason Trump comes into play is that rules about the way Apple works with app developers are one of many things Big Tech companies hate about European regulations. (US lawmakers, meanwhile, spent years promising to regulate Big Tech themselves but have largely left it alone: Almost all attempts at Big Tech regulation have instead come from lawsuits filed or threatened by Trump's and Joe Biden's administrations.) They've been making it clear to Trump that they'd like him to do something about it. It's certainly not a coincidence that Mark Zuckerberg, who made a dramatic and vocal pivot into Trumpdom last month, now calls European tech rules "almost like a tariff."

Message received. Last month, Trump used a Davos speech to complain about European fines and regulations aimed at Big Tech. This week, in the middle of tariff threats/negotiations with Mexico and Canada, he suggested that he'd be turning his attention to Europe shortly.

That doesn't necessarily mean American tech companies will get what they want. Trump will have a long list of concessions he'll want out of Europe, and it's entirely unclear what he'll prioritize and what, if anything, he'll get.

But you should still connect the dots between porn apps and potential EU tariffs — because Big Tech companies certainly are.

• First Disney, then Meta. Now it looks like Paramount is planning to settle a Trump lawsuit.
• In normal times, Trump's suits against media and tech companies that upset him would face a steep challenge.
• But since Trump won in November, things have changed. Is this how business will work for the next four years?

Disney paid Donald Trump $15 million. Meta paid $22 million.

Next question: How much will Paramount pay?

The question after that: How many more giant tech and media companies will pay the president of the United States to settle lawsuits?

And the truly big question hanging over all of this: Is this just going to be how business works during Trump 2.0?

Here's the context: Donald Trump has a history of filing lawsuits — or at least threatening to file lawsuits — against people and companies he says have besmirched his image. But until he won his second presidential election in the fall, he had only scattered success when he did that.

Things are different now.

In December, Disney agreed to make a $15 million donation to Trump's future presidential library to settle a defamation suit. Earlier this week, Meta agreed to donate $22 million to the same library to settle a suit Trump filed after the company suspended his Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Now Paramount is in talks to make a similar settlement, as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have reported and I've confirmed. (A Paramount rep declined to comment; I've asked the Trump White House for comment.) And there will be enormous pressure on the newspaper publisher Gannett to settle another suit Trump filed after the election.

There are some differences between the suits. The Disney suit, for instance, was a somewhat straightforward defamation claim, focused on comments ABC's anchor George Stephanopoulos made during a live interview. The Meta case revolved around Trump's argument that the company had violated his First Amendment rights.

The Paramount and Gannett filings accuse those companies of election interference and consumer fraud, respectively. Trump was specifically unhappy with the way Paramount's "60 Minutes" program handled an interview with Kamala Harris, and about a poll Gannett's Des Moines Register published before the election that projected he would lose in Iowa.

What all those suits had in common: lots of skepticism and eye-rolling from legal experts who said Trump would have a very difficult time making his case.

But as it turns out, when the person making that case turns out to be the most powerful man in the world, the equation gets reworked.

Again, each situation is different: Disney sources told The New York Times they were worried the suit could end up at the Supreme Court, and that a loss there could set back First Amendment rights. Meta's settlement comes as Mark Zuckerberg has made a loud and dramatic pivot to become a Trump supporter.

In Paramount's case, both its current owner — Shari Redstone — and the man who wants to buy it — Oracle's founder Larry Ellison, on behalf of his son, David — are aligned with Trump to varying degrees. But that deal requires federal approval, and Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to run the Federal Communications Commission, has already said he intends to scrutinize the way Paramount's CBS handled the "60 Minutes" interview. Technically, Trump's suit and the FCC's approval of the deal are considered separate issues. But it's easy enough to draw a dotted line.

It's also easy to see a stark pattern emerging: Powerful companies with enormous legal resources are deciding that they're better off making a payment — in the form of a donation — to Trump than fighting him.

If you're reading this, that suggests you have some interest in the news. For people who care about news — or any of the protections the First Amendment provides — all of this likely sounds chilling. But even if you're a press/media/Big Tech skeptic or foe, you might worry about the lawsuits and settlements, and the precedent they set. What happens when Donald Trump — or a future president — comes after a company or industry you care about?

• There's an astonishing amount of news coming out of the tech world right now.
• This week, it's DeepSeek. Before that, it was the TikTok ban-then-maybe-sale, huge infrastructure deals, and, of course, Trump.
• I wanted an insider's view on Silicon Valley's hopes and fears, so I talked to The Information's founder, Jessica Lessin.

This week's news about DeepSeek — the Chinese-built AI engine that's supposedly just as powerful as top-of-the-line stuff out of the US but built at a fraction of the cost — shook Silicon Valley and beyond.

But that's just one of a series of issues roiling tech. The big difference: At the moment, DeepSeek isn't intertwined with Donald Trump.

Just about everything else in the tech world right now seems deeply enmeshed with Trump 2.0 — from a potential forced sale of TikTok to the parade of the most powerful CEOs in the world aligning themselves with the new president.

I wanted to get a view of all this from the Bay Area, so I turned to Jessica Lessin, the deeply sourced journalist who has been covering tech for decades — first at The Wall Street Journal and now at The Information, the publication she founded in 2013.

We had what podcasters like to call a "wide-ranging conversation" that went in all sorts of directions, and you can listen to the whole thing on my "Channels" show. Here's an edited excerpt, focusing on DeepSeek's reverberations and the swirl around TikTok.

The DeepSeek news is still shaking Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and people are still sorting out what it means. What is your takeaway?

I think what's happening here is that DeepSeek is striking at a question that is so important: What is the comparative advantage that businesses can have around AI, and where is the money going to be made over the very long term?

We've seen extraordinary growth, extraordinary products coming out of AI. Everyone says we're in early innings, and we are. And so how is this technology going to advance? How easy is it going to be for others to build great models, and what great businesses are going to be built? I've been feeling like that's an open question for many, many months. And I feel like what happened with DeepSeek is — everyone kind of realized, "Wow, this is still a very open question."

Over the last year, there was a conventional wisdom jelling that said the AI winners are going to be the biggest technology companies — the ones that can afford all the chips, all the engineers, all the enormous power these things use. This has upended everything. It's been fascinating to watch the Wall Street reaction.

I think what Wall Street is doing is in some way actually like a meme moment. Not to get too meta here, but DeepSeek kind of had that feeling: The model's been out for a while. They released another model. All of a sudden, Marc Andreessen and Bill Gurley are tweeting about it. It captures Silicon Valley's imagination-slash-paranoia. And so I think Wall Street did what Wall Street does, which is sort of have blunt reactions on all fronts.

You guys had a story, which I assume contributed to the panic, reporting that Meta had spun up war rooms to figure out what they were going to do about DeepSeek. You can imagine Wall Street seeing a story like that coming from your publication and thinking: "Mark Zuckerberg is worried about this. We should be worried about this."

I just think Wall Street is still trying to figure out what to make of AI in general. We are just days after major infrastructure announcements that investors of all stripes are trying to digest. Now we have this evidence that, you know, it may be easier to catch up. So I think so much remains to be seen. But to your earlier point, I still think the largest companies have a lot to gain with AI because they have the distribution; they have the existing business lines that can be turbocharged with it. I don't think that's changed with this announcement.

Donald Trump says he's going to find a non-Chinese buyer for some or all of TikTok. What's your best bet on who that will be?

I go back to the last time this came around [in 2020], and the conversations were furthest along with the consortium that included Microsoft, Walmart, and Oracle. TikTok is strategically valuable to these Big Tech companies because it's one of the largest customers in the world of cloud computing, AI chips, data centers, and so forth. So I sort of believe — and know, to some degree — all of those entities are back at the table. And, you know, you can't count out Elon Musk.

It's surprising how quiet he is about all of that.

It's surprising.

He bought Twitter and, in many ways, it hasn't worked out. You could argue that it has worked for him in other ways. But TikTok is way more influential than Twitter ever was or could be.

Out of his many challenges, selling Teslas with Full Self-Driving capabilities in China is near the top of the list. He is not allowed to do it. It's hurting his position in the China market, which is essential. And so he's looking for every bargaining chip possible. I think his relationship with Trump has been driven in part by this need to negotiate with China. So I think that's important context here. And I'm sure that, like any good businessman, he'd be trying to use this to his advantage. I think we're going to have to just play this out a little bit and see what happens. And all options are still on the table. I mean, you could also have the Chinese government just saying, no way.

Tech leaders are embracing Trump very publicly. How much of that is because they want to get something from him, and how much of it is because they're afraid of angering him?

I think the story is a little more complicated than just wanting to be in his good graces. I think Silicon Valley senses there is a moment to unwind many policies — ranging from tax law to DEI — of the last several years. So tech leaders are really taking this moment. They are aligned with Trump on many issues. They're taking this moment to try and seize that, to get their companies back to where they want them to be.

• Mark Zuckerberg has spent many billions of dollars trying to build computers people will wear on their faces.
• It has yet to happen. But Zuckerberg says 2025 will be a pivotal year for that tech.
• His big hope: that AI-powered glasses — like the souped-up Ray-Bans Meta sells — become "the next computing platform."

Tech giants have been trying to find a way to put a computer on your head — and then have people buy that computer — for years. So far, it hasn't really caught on.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg says, we're going to find out if people are really going to buy these things in meaningful numbers — or if the industry is going to have to wait even longer for the future to arrive.

"This will be a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform, like we've been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind," the Meta CEO said during his company's earnings call Wednesday.

Zuckerberg has seen some promising signs that he might have figured it out. Sales of Meta's Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, while modest compared to mainstream tech products, have been a pleasant surprise for the company — Zuckerberg called them a "real hit" on the company's call.

And last fall, Meta showed off an impressive demo version of its Orion headset, a much more powerful computer that looks like oversized glasses; the company hopes to have one that's ready for consumers to buy in the next few years.

On the other hand: Revenue for Meta's Reality Labs unit, which sells the Ray Bans along with its more cumbersome Quest goggles, remained essentially flat over the last year. Sales of $1.08 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 were up a mere 1.1% compared to the previous year.

So, it doesn't look like there's been a meaningful surge of people buying any of the devices Meta has been selling. In the meantime, Reality Labs — which also includes the company's once-hyped metaverse projects — has lost more than $60 billion over five years.

What's going to change about this year? Zuckerberg didn't get into details, except that he thinks AI will make the glasses much more compelling for many more people.

And if it doesn't happen this year, it's going happen … eventually, he insists.

"There are a lot of people in the world who have glasses," he said on Wednesday's call. "It's kind of hard for me to imagine that a decade or more from now, all the glasses aren't going to basically be AI glasses, as well as a lot of people who don't wear glasses today finding that to be a useful thing."

• TikTok! It's still here in the US. That's good news for creators that make money working on the platform.
• Except: Most successful creators see very little money from TikTok itself.
• Gymnasium cofounder Adam Faze explains how to turn TikTok eyeballs into money.

A week ago TikTok disappeared in America. Then it was back. It looks like it will stay that way, for at least a month or two — even though the legal questions around its existence remain … fuzzy.

This is good news for Adam Faze, who makes his living on TikTok. Faze co-founded Gymnasium, a content studio that specializes in TikTok videos, with some success: Perhaps you've seen "Boy Room," a can-you-believe-this-filth tour of young men's ... terrible living spaces.

The first season of "Boy Room" was a viral hit for Faze. But Faze says his company made almost zero dollars from its popularity. (Then again, it didn't spend much, either: Faze says each episode involved a crew of three people and cost around $2,000 for a two-minute show.) The money is coming in the second season of "Boy Room," which Amazon is sponsoring, and which will feature hints on ways to fix your Boy Room — which will involve buying things from Amazon.

I talked to Faze this week because there's been a lot of discussion about how important TikTok is to creators and influencers who make money on TikTok. But there's not a lot of discussion about how that actually works.

The TLDR: Being popular on TikTok doesn't translate to making money on TikTok, since TikTok doesn't routinely share its advertising money with its creators (the only TikTok competitor that actually does this is YouTube). The way to make money on TikTok is to make something popular that brands will want to be associated with, and work out deals with them directly.

Here's an edited excerpt of my conversation with Faze. You can hear the whole thing on my Channels podcast.

Business Insider: Why start a business focused on TikTok, as opposed to any other video platform?

Adam Faze: It's the quickness of how we're able to see if we have a hit or not. On TikTok, we usually know within the first three episodes we post if we have a successful show. That algorithm is just so phenomenal at defining who would or would not like something that, for us, it just is a no-brainer to test shows [on TikTok] first.

How do you make money from a viral hit on TikTok?

The benefit of coming into the space years after TikTok was introduced is we never revolved our business model around "How much is TikTok going to pay us?" We went into this company thinking we would never make a dollar from any platform.

We've probably generated about a half a billion views on TikTok since the company started. I think we've maybe made less than $20,000 from TikTok.

YouTube remains the only big video platform that consistently shares ad revenue with creators. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do not.

The reality is, short-form content is a great ad business for the platform. It's not for the creator — except for things now like TikTok Shop, where you have individual creators who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month off of, basically, QVC videos.

I think TikTok's opinion has always been that you use our platform to make a name for yourself, to become a star — and then you will find other ways to monetize off the platform.

So you often hear creators talking about a brand deal. What does that mean in TikTok terms?

For your regular, everyday influencers that have a following, fashion companies and airlines and theme parks are going to sponsor that influencer. They'll tell them to make a video and they'll say, "Hey here's $30,000, go make a video in the style that you normally would. And just be supportive of the business."

Mention us in some way and show off the product.

For us, we really want to find truly organic ways of bringing a sponsor into our content.

You said you can figure out if a show is a hit after three episodes. Do you have hunches prior to that? Did you think "Boy Room" was going to be a hit, or was it just random?

We only release things we're a fan of. So we always have a hunch that we think it's going to work. Out of the six shows [we've made] they actually were all a success, viewership-wise. Sometimes they were just very hard to monetize.

Unfortunately, that is a huge part of what allows us to greenlight shows — do we think we would be able to make money on this?

So, not just "Will people watch it?" but "Is this something an Amazon or someone else would sponsor?"

I'll give you an example. We used to make a show called "Clockwork Dynasty" with these two watch dealers from 47th Street who are dear friends to this day. It was basically "Pawn Stars." We built their watch shop in our office. People would come on the show and buy, sell, trade, luxury watches.

That show had a consistent 1 million-plus viewers an episode. But our audience was 99% boys between the ages of 18 and 24, which in the watch space isn't that monetized.

They're not buying luxury watches.

And so a show like that, sometimes you have to do the math. Unfortunately, it didn't make sense for us to keep making the show, even though we love it and people love it as well.

• You probably didn't see "The Apprentice," a Trump biopic that came out last year — very few people did.
• But now the movie is going to get a boost via two high-profile Academy Award nominations.
• That could be uncomfortable for Trump and Hollywood, which shied away from the movie last year.

Donald Trump didn't want you to see "The Apprentice" last year. And he got his way: The unflattering Trump biopic, which struggled to get to theaters, was a flop when it eventually got there last October.

But now "The Apprentice" is going to get a lot more attention, courtesy of the Oscars: Sebastian Stan just received a best actor nomination for his portrayal of Trump. And Jeremy Strong's take on Roy Cohn, Trump's former attorney and mentor, earned him a best supporting actor nomination.

Like most things on TV, the Academy Awards don't get anything like the attention they used to get in a pre-internet age. But they are still the Academy Awards, and they still draw a bigger audience than just about anything that's not an NFL game. Last year's show drew nearly 20 million TV viewers in the US.

Which means that when this year's show airs on March 2, there's a decent chance that a film the president of the United States tried to stop from being shown — via a cease-and-desist letter — could get a burst of new publicity and exposure. I wonder what Trump and his supporters will think of that.

I also wonder what the people who run Hollywood's biggest studios and streamers — the same people who didn't want to touch "The Apprentice" — will think of that.

"Sebastian and Jeremy took career-defining risks to do this movie. And they f***ing nailed their roles," Gabriel Sherman, the journalist who wrote the movie's screenplay, tells me via email. "It's also satisfying that the Academy is standing up for great art at a time when the culture seems to be chilled by the new political climate."

The backstory behind Apprentice could be its own movie, and it's a hard one to summarize. I'll try here: Mark Rapaport, the producer who financed the movie, ended up clashing with Sherman and director Ali Abbasi, and told them he didn't want it released. (I've asked Rapaport for comment about Thursday's news.) Rapaport is also the son-in-law of billionaire Dan Snyder, who bankrolled Rapaport's production company, and who also donated $1 million to Trump's 2017 inauguration.

The controversy generated attention when the movie debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, but the movie struggled to find a Hollywood distributor — a fact Sherman chalked up to the industry's fear of angering Trump prior to last November's election.

"Trump talks a lot about "weaponization of government," Sherman told me last fall. "This is a very specific case where he has now influenced the corporate and creative decisions of these Hollywood companies to basically chill content that he would object to."

For a longer version of the story, you can listen to me talking to Sherman about the movie on my Channels podcast. And for a medium-sized version, check out excerpts of that chat here.

• On Sunday, TikTok and some US tech companies ignored a TikTok-ban law at the urging of Donald Trump.
• Trump wasn't president at the time. Once he became president, he signed an order to put the ban on hold.
• Does Trump have that power? It's unclear. That's a problem for tech companies.

Here's a 2025 conundrum for Big Tech companies: Do they follow the president's orders? Or do they follow the law?

That's what the likes of Apple, Google, and Oracle are grappling with following a chaotic weekend that saw TikTok voluntarily shut itself down in the US, then restart less than a day later, claiming that "President Trump" said it was OK to do so.

A couple of problems with that argument: Donald Trump wasn't president of the United States this weekend — Joe Biden was still in the White House. And yes: Trump immediately signed an executive order after he once again became president on Monday telling TikTok and other tech companies to ignore a law that says TikTok can't operate in the US while it's owned by a Chinese company. But it's far from clear how much weight Trump's order holds.

So in the very near term, attorneys and executives at tech companies need to decide whether they're willing to take Trump's word, or if they need additional assurances.

At the moment, it looks like Oracle, controlled by Larry Ellison, a Trump backer, is going with Trump's assurances and is providing cloud services that are keeping TikTok running in the US. Apple and Google, which used to distribute TikTok via their app stores, don't seem convinced: TikTok disappeared from their stores on Sunday and has yet to return. That means US users can have all the TikTok they want, but it prevents TikTok from updating the app for maintenance and repairs — something that could eventually cause problems. (I've asked Oracle for comment. Google declined to comment, and Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.)

One possible out for Google and Apple: Trump has ordered his attorney general, who seems likely to be Pam Bondi, to send letters to Apple, Google, and other providers giving them the all clear to ignore the law. But Bondi isn't attorney general yet, and even when Apple et al. get that letter, it's not clear whether it will be enough to satisfy them.

I'm not going to get into the weeds about the nature of executive orders vs. laws — or whether Trump's claim that he can at least temporarily override a law because of national security concerns would hold up in court. Suffice it to say that there isn't any clarity about any of this: Even Trump allies like Sen. Tom Cotton and House Speaker Mike Johnson have put out statements that seem to conflict with Trump's statements.

The point is that no one can say, with a straight face, that they have 100% confidence about whether the law, passed overwhelmingly by Congress last year and upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court decision last week, is binding. That's an astonishing place for us to be.

It's also not one that we can pin completely on Trump. In his last days in office, Biden also said he wouldn't enforce the law he signed last year — though he did it via anonymous officials speaking with reporters, and eventually his press secretary, and not via an official order. At the same time, some Democrats who voted for the bill in the spring, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, spent the past few days arguing that the ban in the sell-or-ban law they approved should be delayed.

But Trump is taking the uncertainty and supercharging it: In social media statements and a press conference he held Monday, he seemed to suggest that the US government itself might end up owning TikTok. Or that maybe it would be American companies that own half the operation. He also argued that TikTok's Chinese ownership really doesn't matter, since the US already uses lots of other stuff made in China, like "telephones." And that even if China is snooping on US users, that probably also doesn't matter because TikTok is mostly used by kids, and, "If China's going to get information about young kids … I dunno. To be honest, I think we have bigger problems than them."

It's worth watching all three minutes of this White House press conference clip, just to get a sense of how off-the-cuff Trump seems to be treating the whole thing. Imagine running a trillion-dollar company and being forced to decipher this:

We have been here before, of course. America and the rest of the world spent much of the first Trump administration trying to figure out whether Trump really meant what he was saying, or if he could actually act on what he was saying, and whether he'd change his mind a little while later.

One big difference this time around: Tech executives, along with many other US leaders, are scrambling to tell Trump how supportive they are of his presidency this time. But it's one thing to praise Trump, or cut him a check, or to be conspicuously on camera during his inauguration. Trusting that his say-so is good enough to get you out of trouble for violating a law — if that's what actually happens — is brand-new ground.

• The Supreme Court upheld a law that could see TikTok shut down on Sunday.
• Or maybe it won't shut down?
• There's lots of confusing and contradictory information out there. Here's what we know.

TikTok is shutting down in the US on Sunday.

Or maybe TikTok won't get shut down because Joe Biden or Donald Trump will save it before then.

Or maybe TikTok will get shut down on Sunday, and then Trump will restart it a day or two later.

Confused? Me too. It's possible things will get easier to understand in the near future. They could also remain opaque for some time.

But let's try to sort out where things stand right now — again, with the caveat that this could all change soon.

The law and TikTok

The one thing we know for sure: Last year, Congress passed a bill, signed into law by Biden, that required ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell its US operations to a non-Chinese owner. The deadline for that transaction is this coming Sunday.

Everything after that is at least somewhat fuzzy.

For instance: While the intent of the law is to force ByteDance to sell US TikTok or shut it down, it's not entirely clear what would happen if the law went into effect.

The law requires app stores like the ones run by Apple and Google to stop distributing TikTok, but that doesn't mean TikTok would disappear from your phone. The law also prohibits internet companies from maintaining or updating the app. But it's unclear whether that means TikTok would immediately fall apart, or if it could limp along in some crippled manner.

But last week, an attorney for TikTok told the Supreme Court that the service would go "dark" in the US on Sunday if the law stayed in place. Subsequent press reports said that TikTok planned to simply shut down the service itself on Sunday, hoping that it would create political pressure. The Information reported that TikTok planned on sending users who open the app to a website with information about the ban.

The courts and TikTok

TikTok has spent months trying unsuccessfully to get the law overturned, arguing that it violates the First Amendment. TikTok got a last-ditch hearing before the US Supreme Court last week, but the justices seemed skeptical of its arguments. And on Friday, they upheld the law.

"There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of communication," the court said. "But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok's data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary."

The possible TikTok loophole

The TikTok sell-or-ban law does offer a theoretical reprieve for the app. It says that prior to the Sunday deadline, the president can grant a 90-day extension if there's "significant progress" in place to transfer ownership of US TikTok, including "relevant binding agreements" to make that happen.

But so far, TikTok and its owner have shown no public interest in a sale, and there are no reports that a non-Chinese buyer has a plan in place, let alone a deal.

It's also worth noting that no Big Tech company with the resources to buy and run a company the size of TikTok has shown any interest — in public — to take it on. The only plausible buyer mentioned to date is Elon Musk — Trump's new ally — but that came up only in recent days, via reports that suggested it was a last-minute brainstorm from Chinese officials in Beijing. Musk has remained uncharacteristically mute about the scenario.

The TikTok possible workarounds

This is where the information is by far the fuzziest, and often contradictory.

For instance: Trump, who will become president on Monday, previously tried to push through his own TikTok ban-or-sale effort during his first term in office. But last year, Trump said he thought TikTok should stay in the US — and he's been even more enthusiastic about the app following his reelection.

Last month, Trump's attorneys asked the Supreme Court to push back the January 19 deadline so he could work on the deal once he became president again. And Trump has invited TikTok CEO Shou Chew to attend his inauguration, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. He's been offered a prime seat for the event — on the dais alongside other important figures, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Various news reports and analysts have talked about a scenario where Trump brokers a deal between ByteDance and a buyer once he's in office. The law allows for that while keeping the restrictions on TikTok in place until a deal is done.

Under normal circumstances, it would take many days, weeks, or even months to get a complicated deal worth tens of billions of dollars executed. Which would mean TikTok would stay dark, or at least crippled in some way, for some time. But perhaps Trump thinks he can get something done in record time.

And on Friday, Trump said that he had spoken with China's leader, Xi Jinping, about "balancing Trade, Fentanyl, TikTok and many other subjects" and that he expected them to "solve many problems together."

Does the TikTok law just not get enforced?

An alternate scenario you may have read about involves Trump simply overturning the ban via an executive order — a mechanism he has already said he intends to use to reverse other moves Biden made in office.

But the whole point of a law — again, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president — is that it's a law. And it's supposed to be hard to change or modify a law unless the courts weigh in or Congress amends it. So it's very unclear whether an executive order would suffice. (It's worth noting that the Wall Street analyst Rich Greenfield believes that Trump can overturn the law with an executive order, by relying on an argument that gives the president power when it comes to foreign affairs and national security.)

Another scenario recently floated is that Trump could simply tell Pam Bondi, his nominee for attorney general, not to enforce the law — an extraordinary step. Asked about that prospect in her confirmation hearing, Bondi declined to comment. It's also worth considering whether the likes of Apple and Google would follow Trump's theoretical command to ignore the law while it's still on the books.

One last bit of confusion: Members of outgoing President Joe Biden's team, who have been quiet about the looming deadline for weeks, are now trying to figure out a solution themselves, NBC reported Wednesday. "Americans shouldn't expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday," an anonymous administration official told the outlet.

Now press reports indicate that Biden's plan to deal with the ban is to … ignore it for a day, and pass it along to Trump to deal with.

At this point, the only thing we can really tell you with any certainty is that we'll know at least a bit more in the next few days.

• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai will attend Donald Trump's inauguration.
• That's not a shock — everyone else in tech is going, and Google/Alphabet already announced it was donating $1 million to the event.
• It's most definitely a sign of the times.

The tech contingent heading to Donald Trump's inauguration next week is getting bigger every day: Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be there as well, according to a person familiar with his plans.

Pichai joins a long list of Silicon Valley CEOs who plan to be in Washington when Trump is sworn in, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla's Elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will also be in attendance.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Pichai will join as well. Last week, his company announced that it would be making a $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural committee — as many other tech giants have also announced.

It's also worth pointing out that when Trump won his first presidential election in 2016, he also got a gathering of tech CEOs to pay him a visit.

But that trip was to Trump Tower in New York City — before his 2017 inauguration — and most of it was primarily off-camera.

This time around, the whole point is to make sure that everyone knows you're there — and that Donald Trump knows everyone knows.

• Have you bought a virtual reality or augmented reality headset?
• If so, you're part of a small group of consumers — despite repeated predictions that the market will boom.
• Meta alone has lost $60 billion on this tech over five years. It's going to keep spending, says Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has spent tens of billions of dollars chasing it. Some of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Sony, have poured in billions more. For years.

But so far, no one has nailed it.

Maybe one day wearing computers on our heads will be something many of us do all the time, instead of a novelty we try a few times and then forget. We're not there yet.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about super high-end devices like the Apple Vision Pro or low-priced novelties, like early editions of Snap's Spectacles. Or whether you're discussing virtual reality devices that create an entirely new world around the user or augmented reality headsets that let you see the outside world as well as digital images. All of these devices have yet to take off. Consumer demand isn't budging.

That hasn't stopped the tech industry from trying. Or deterred people around the tech world from predicting that one day, this will be a huge market.

You can see this spelled out in a new chart from analyst and investor Matthew Ball, as part of a new report he's released on the problems in the video gaming business. This one tracks the gap between projected headset sales, as estimated by International Data Corp., and actual sales.

As you can see, while IDC has been continually bullish about VR and AR headsets, consumer interest has lagged far behind. No matter what's on offer, at whatever price, these devices seem mired in the 10 million units a year or less range.

That's not to suggest that Zuckerberg — who has racked up more than $60 billion in losses on this tech over the past five years, filings show — is chasing after the market because of an IDC estimate. It just shows you that for close to a decade, the industry has been excited about this stuff, while many consumers remain unimpressed.

I talked to Jitesh Ubrani, the IDC researcher who works on this stuff, about the gap between his company's projections — which, to be fair, are projections — and reality.

He said his shop has become less optimistic over time about the market, which you can see reflected on the right side of the chart.

"Everyone is a bit more realistic about these expectations," he said, noting that the market for the tech has been "notably volatile" over the past few years, as big players like Microsoft and Google temper their interest in headsets. Meta PR declined to comment.

In his public comments, Zuckerberg has been telling investors that he'll continue chasing virtual and augmented reality tech, and that they should expect to see more losses in the future.

For him, the stakes seem quite clear: He wants people to use a new computing platform instead of, or in addition to, phones. And he wants to be able to interact with them on that platform without Google or Apple getting involved, as they do with their mobile platforms. And if all of that happens — meaning that Zuckerberg essentially creates the next iPhone — then burning tens of billions on R&D will seem like a good bet.

Meanwhile, Meta does seem to be making progress. The Orion glasses Zuckerberg showed off last fall — but isn't selling yet — are super-impressive. I've tried them, and I could definitely imagine using some version of them if they were way cheaper, and worked as advertised.

But those are big ifs, and it's possible Meta never figures out how to make these things at scale, and in a way that will sell hundreds of millions of units per year — like Apple does with its phones. But someone, somewhere, will keep insisting that the headset of the future is just around the corner.

• Could Elon Musk buy TikTok?
• Several reports say that's what Chinese government officials are contemplating.
• It sure seems like a stretch! And there are lots of downsides. But we're in a weird time where weird deals could become reality.

MuskTok?

I mean, on the one hand — why not? We're already in a world where Mark Zuckerberg is using Donald Trump's election as a reason to change the way Meta maintains its restrooms. (Seriously.)

So why not have Elon Musk swoop in with a deal to buy TikTok from ByteDance, the Chinese company that currently owns it, to get around a law that's meant to ban the service on January 19?

That's what Chinese government officials are pondering, per Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times, meanwhile, reports that China is merely hoping Musk will somehow "broker" a solution.

All the reports convey the sense that all of this is … fluid, at best. All three note that it's unclear how much anyone at TikTok or ByteDance knows about any of this. And Beijing's thoughts about this are "very preliminary and mostly brainstorming," an official tells the FT.

TikTok, for its part, relayed the same statement to me that it provided to other reporters on Monday night: "We can't be expected to comment on pure fiction." Musk didn't respond to my request for comment.

So it's hard to get too worked up about something that seems like it's in the barely-on-the-drawing-board stage.

Still, we are in a world — again — where barely-there ideas have to be taken at least seriously, if not literally. Ask the residents of Greenland.

So, for the record: Elon Musk makes perfect sense as a TikTok owner. He has the capital, the technical capacity, and the political backing to make it happen.

When I suggested this back in March, I also noted that this would be a terrible idea since Musk's track record at Twitter shows what happens when you give him control of a social media platform — he runs it erratically and scares off users and advertisers.

That's all still true.

My hunch, though, is that, unlike Twitter, TikTok would likely weather Musk's ownership much better simply because of its nature: It's a very big video entertainment service, and even if a meaningful number of users leave because they don't like Musk's ownership, many others would stick around because they like being entertained by videos. The same goes for advertisers.

That is: Even a diminished TikTok would certainly be of use to both Musk and many TikTok constituents. And certainly, many of TikTok's 170 million US users would rather use a Musk-owned TikTok — if they even knew who owned it in the first place — than go without a TikTok at all.

I still have many, many questions about how any of this would work in reality.

Starting with this: The law on this one is quite clear. In order to avoid an effective ban by January 19, TikTok needs a new US owner — or, failing that, Joe Biden, who is still the US president, can provide a one-time 90-day extension if there's "significant" progress on a deal, including a "binding legal agreement" to get something done.

So assuming neither thing happens over the next few days — and the Supreme Court upholds the law, as observers seem to think will happen — what would the plan be? Come back days, weeks, or months later with a new law to reverse the old one — even though the last one had overwhelming support from Congress?

But before we get too deep on any of this, let's see what happens in the next few days.

• Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery have canceled Venu, a would-be sports streaming service.
• The companies announced the decision days after announcing plans to launch the service.
• What happened in between?

On Monday, the people behind Venu — the sports streaming service co-owned by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery — were gearing up their launch plans after solving a legal challenge.

A few days later, they decided to kill the service entirely — though it looks like what will amount to a different version of the original idea may end up launching, anyway.

Disney, Fox and WBD announced plans for Venu nearly a year ago and initially scheduled a debut in the fall of 2024. But that joint venture will never see the light of day, the three companies announced Friday morning.

The reasoning behind the astonishing decision, via sources at the three companies: the premise of even more legal challenges, which could delay the streamer even more and cost the companies time and money.

While the Venu joint venture settled an antitrust lawsuit with the streaming TV service Fubo on Monday, that decision drew immediate complaints from other TV providers, who said they were being prevented from launching a similar service.

The satellite TV services DirecTV and Dish both sent letters this week to the federal judge who had been overseeing the Fubo court case, arguing that the settlement was a "payoff" and suggesting that they would file their own suits. Other TV providers might launch similar objections, people at the joint-venture companies say.

So on Thursday, Venu's owners decided to bail completely. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels," the companies said Friday.

That end of Venu doesn't affect the deal Disney announced this week to essentially buy Fubo itself: It's merging its Hulu + Live TV service with Fubo and will own 70% of the company once that deal is closed.

And part of that deal will give Fubo the right to launch a new "skinny" bundle of Disney properties that show sports, like ESPN and ABC.

On Monday, when Fubo and the joint-venture partners announced a settlement, Fubo executives also told investors that they had a new distribution agreement with Fox, and suggested that Fox would be part of that skinny bundle as well.

Which would mean that Fubo would end up with the rights to sell a service that looks a lot like Venu — minus the programming WBD was supposed to provide. It seems likely that for now WBD will sit pat with its existing distribution plans — relying primarily on its TNT network, some of which also streams on its Max platform.

Which means Fubo, which a year ago was an also-ran streamer that was shut out of a crucial sports streaming deal, now seems like "the undisputed winner" of the entire mess, as an industry executive told me Friday morning.

A Fubo rep said the company had no news to announce regarding a possible Fox deal. Fox declined to comment.

What does this mean for viewers? It's hard to say: The initial announcement about the Venu joint venture seemed like a very big deal. But it was an open question whether sports viewers would pay $43 for a service that had a lot of sports — but not all the sports, including some major parts of the NFL schedule.

Meanwhile, Disney is continuing with plans to launch its own ESPN-only service this fall. And in addition to the Fubo "skinny bundle" the two companies announced, Disney has licensed a similar deal with DirecTV. All of which means there are going to be lots of ways to watch, and pay for, ESPN in the next year or so.

• Meta's content-moderation changes aim to appease Donald Trump and his conservative allies.
• Mark Zuckerberg's moves follow efforts to align with Trump, including meetings and policy shifts.
• Meta's new approach includes ending third-party fact-checking and demoting its Trust and Safety team.

Sometimes the obvious thing is the obvious thing.

Which is to say: You can make pro and con arguments for many of the massive changes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced about the way his company is going to moderate — or not moderate — content. It's a complicated topic.

But the most important takeaway is that all of Tuesday's news has been rolled out specifically for Donald Trump, and the new political reign that officially kicks into gear on January 20.

That includes the language Zuckerberg and his company are using to describe the changes — like when Zuckerberg criticizes "legacy media" and declares that "the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point" in a video posted Tuesday morning.

It includes the venue Meta used to announce the changes — Fox News, Trump's favorite TV channel. And, of course, the changes themselves. We'll get to those in a second.

But first, some crucial context: Tuesday's news follows a series of moves Zuckerberg and Meta have made to make nice with Trump and Republicans, which began before November's election.

A reminder of that timeline:

• In July, Zuckerberg praised Trump as a "badass" after the GOP leader survived an assassination attempt.
• In August, Zuckerberg sent Republican Rep. Jim Jordan a letter in which he acknowledged moderation mistakes in the past.
• In November, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a postelection audience with Trump, then pledged $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee.
• Last week, Zuckerberg announced that he was replacing his head of policy: Nick Clegg, a former British politician, was out, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican.
• On Monday, Zuckerberg announced that he was adding Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a prominent Trump backer, to his board of directors.

Add it all up and there's no way to see Zuckerberg's moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president's conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg's properties were biased against them. It's crystal clear.

As far as the changes themselves: It's entirely possible that some of the stuff Zuckerberg and his team announced Tuesday reflects what Zuckerberg actually believes. (I've asked Meta PR whether Zuckerberg wants to expand on his comments.)

Figuring out the best way to moderate — or not moderate — giant platforms that depend on free contributions from their users has bedeviled all the Big Tech companies for years. And Zuckerberg has never seemed comfortable with the various moderation layers and rules his company has added over time.*

He has also been signaling that he's particularly unhappy about the way the company responded to criticism and regulation following the 2016 election and subsequent revelations like the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

So getting rid of third-party fact-checking of controversial posts in favor of the "Community Notes" system Elon Musk's Twitter/X uses might very well be what Zuckerberg thinks makes sense. It certainly fits a Silicon Valley ethos that's much more comfortable using a combination of users and software to make decisions about what people see on those platforms, rather than asking executives to take responsibility for those calls.

The same goes for the demotion of Meta's Trust and Safety team — which is most definitely what Zuckerberg intends by moving those operations from California to Texas, which, at a minimum, is an attrition play. Zuckerberg has long talked about wanting those roles to eventually become automated, and in the meantime, hiring humans to do that work has been difficult, messy, or worse. Simply doing less of it is one way to get at the problem. (Worth noting: In 2023, the Meta investor and board member Marc Andreessen described Trust and Safety operations as part of "The Enemy" he wanted tech to fight back against.)

And figuring out how to run a platform that's based in America but subject to regulation around the world is a problem that all US tech companies struggle with. You can imagine the appeal of Zuckerberg's new approach — simply announcing that the rest of the world is anti-growth.

There will be a lot of devil in the details here. For instance, Zuckerberg certainly can't fully adopt Musk's next-to-anything-goes approach for his companies. Unlike Musk, he isn't in a position to scare off users and advertisers who want a clean, well-lit space.

But those are all details to hash out in the future. Tuesday's news is simple: It's Donald Trump's world, and Mark Zuckerberg is living in it.

*Criticisms of Meta/Facebook's moderation attempts don't come only from the right. I always remember the prime minister of Norway, among others, complaining when Facebook took down posts that used a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from the Vietnam War — a move Facebook first defended, then reversed.