Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Considering Buying TikTok (nytimes.com) 42
According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is reportedly considering buying TikTok. PCMag reports: Kotick floated the idea at a dinner at an Allen & Co. conference earlier this week with a group of potential partners, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the Journal says. Kotick left Activision in late December after more than 30 years following the approval of the Microsoft merger and a tumultuous period that included a damaging discrimination lawsuit. And while he got a hefty golden parachute, it's probably not enough to buy TikTok, so he'll need partners with deep pockets. The report comes amid a vote in the House that would require TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States.
Enshittification (Score:4, Funny)
Surely if anyone can make TikTok worse than it is and an empty shell of what it could have been, itâ(TM)s the boys in charge at Activision.
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Elon should buy TikTok and immediately shut it down.
Re:Enshittification (Score:4, Funny)
But first, rename it "X"
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Y?
Re: Enshittification (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Enshittification (Score:2)
I don't see how Congress could "ban" it, unless they somehow pressured crapple and google into enforcing their own app store policies in a non-discriminatory way, in which case their own existing policies would ban it, in addition to a number of other apps. And Congress does have the power to do that, unless they change their app store policies to allow it in a way that is somehow non-discriminatory, which they may end up doing given crapple and google both allow their first party apps to ignore their own r
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There's news now on TikTok? I thought it's mostly 20 second videos of dimwits who don't know how to hold their phone and spout garbage while flashing buzzwords on the screen.
Oh... now I get it...
Why is there an offer to buy TikTok (Score:2)
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Since the beginning of the dotcom era there have been rich investors laboring under the delusion that eyeballs can be turned into profit. TikTok has a lot of eyeballs.
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How is that a delusion?
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because so far very few have managed to turn those eyeballs into something that makes a profit.
Google and Meta are in the business of monetizing eyeballs.
They have a combined market cap of over three trillion dollars.
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because so far very few have managed to turn those eyeballs into something that makes a profit. Twitter have operated on a loss since inception, much points to that YouTube is not making a profit (or at at least that it took decades for them to even break even). Tons of companies tried the "turn non paying users into profit" in the "New Economy" of the Dot-com Bubble and basically all of them failed.
When companies famously declared in their IPO filings that they’ve never made a profit, are suffering 8 and 9 figure losses every year, and may actually never turn a profit in the future, and yet somehow they were valued at billions, we didn’t exactly get a “new” economy from the dot bomb era. It was more an expansion of that same ignorance, only on a much more corrupt scale.
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Just wait until they try to ban Truth Social, it will start WWIII.
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No need, since that's already US controlled. It's one set of rules for US ownership, another set of rules for everyone else.
Hence why it's a valuable prospect to buy TikTok.
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Unlikely. Both users using it will be pissed for sure, but neither of them matters.
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Just wait until they try to ban Truth Social, it will start WWIII.
Who would ever want to ban it? For Trump detractors, it's evidence. For Trump supporters, it's the word of God Almighty, strait from horse's mouth, so to speak. Apologies to horses, of course.
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every time the US government wants to ban it?
You may have cause and effect backwards. Every time the government talks about banning it, someone sees blood in the water (depressed price) and starts salivating at the prospect of purchasing it, then stuffing it with so many ads that it would make Youtube seem acceptable.
Or it's a I rub your back, you rub my back, we have a capitalistic orgy on the corpses of the fallen type thing, like usually happens between the current owner class and the government.
Wasn't Kotick forced out after the MS buyout? (Score:2)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]
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Yeah, that guy.
Frankly, it sounds like a match made in heaven to me. Sleazeball CEO buys sleazy social media company. With a little luck, he'd be as damaging to Tik Tok as he was to Activision/Blizzard.
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Truth? Truth is not available. You can only choose to get a different set of lies.
Truth has left the building a long time ago. There is no money in truth.
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Xitter is American and gets far more ADL hate than tiktok.
Tiktok is too random to be very useful for propaganda.
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Soviet US (Score:2)
That's pretty much that Putin did in Russia to Western companies that refused to play ball with his regime: forced them to sold to local "investors" at a fraction of the price. From McDonalds to Renault to Ikea.
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Putin forces a sale at below market rate, tiktok will go to the highest bidder.
This is how the usa dies (Score:3)
Banning a foreign company for not sharing the cook (Score:2)
Re: Banning a foreign company for not sharing the (Score:2)
Tik tok is not for sale (Score:2)
shoulda (Score:2)
Shoulda bought it. Then it could be called KoTikTok.