Will TikTok survive?
The contortions at TikTok and Arm are an unfortunate sign of things to come
ON AUGUST 6TH, when the White House told TikTok that it had 45 days to shut down or find an American buyer, there was a risk that the Chinese-owned video app would disappear from America, infuriating its 100m users there and destroying billions of dollars of investors’ wealth. Now a last-minute fudge seems to have been found. TikTok has said it will enter a complex partnership with Oracle, an American tech giant, that is designed to show it is more under American sway. The day before Nvidia, an American semiconductor company, bid $40bn for Arm Holdings, a British-based chip-design firm, triggering a storm in Britain about how to stop its tech champion from being dragged into America’s trade war. Far from being oddities, the two episodes offer a preview of how the new age of nationalism will change the way multinational firms are run—for the worse.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Birth of the Frankenfirm”
From the September 19th 2020 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Leaders
Sir Keir Starmer should aim higher in his reset with the EU
And he needs to be clearer about what Britain wants
To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world’s grids
Less than 3% of the world’s power is internationally traded—a huge wasted opportunity
Chinese AI is catching up, posing a dilemma for Donald Trump
The success of cheap Chinese models threatens America’s technological lead
America has an imperial presidency
And in Donald Trump, an imperialist president for the first time in over a century
Tariffs will harm America, not induce a manufacturing rebirth
Donald Trump’s pursuit of tariffs will make the world poorer—and America, too
How to improve clinical trials
Involving more participants can lead to new medical insights