Congress Ramps Up the Pressure on TikTok

The clock ticks for TikTok

The push to either split TikTok from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or ban it in the U.S. is gaining momentum thanks to a legislative maneuver by the House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The bill’s progress comes as The Times reveals more details about the video platform’s origin story — and the central role played by the Chinese subsidiary of the trading firm of a Republican donor, Jeff Yass.

Johnson has bundled the TikTok bill into a foreign aid package. The speaker said on Wednesday that he would put up for a vote this weekend a spending measure for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that includes a modified version of the TikTok divestment legislation.

The move may force the Senate’s hand: The House overwhelmingly passed the bill last month, but the Senate hasn’t been in a rush to take it up.

Bundling the TikTok measure with aid to Ukraine could force the upper chamber to act. The move “to package TikTok is definitely unusual, but it could succeed,” Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for the financial services firm TD Cowen, told the Times.

That won’t please ByteDance investors, a group that includes major American financial firms including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital. Another is Susquehanna International Group, the firm founded by Yass that owns a roughly 15 percent stake that is worth billions on paper.

The Times’s Mara Hvistendahl and DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch detail the role that Susquehanna’s Chinese subsidiary, SIG China, played in ByteDance’s birth:

• SIG China helped steer the career of Zhang Yiming, the ByteDance founder. It made him the C.E.O. of 99Fang, an online real estate platform, in 2009 and backed his effort to create a social media company in 2012. A Susquehanna director in China would write years later that the housing site deal led to “the birth of ByteDance.”

• A SIG China staffer gave Susquehanna an early look at ByteDance’s precursor. An investment memo described a prototype app created by Zhang that selected content for users to engineer virality and increase “stickiness.” It added: “Social network technology will be used to track user behavior, predict user interest, and build relevancy and recommendation engine.”

The documents surfaced in a Pennsylvania lawsuit in which former Susquehanna contractors accused the firm of taking search technology to ByteDance without compensation.

A spokesman for Susquehanna told The Times that “these claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

What’s next? The Senate could vote on the foreign aid package, including the TikTok bill, as soon as next week.

But opposition against the move isn’t going away: Yass has financed a group pushing against a ban and Chinese diplomats are reportedly lobbying Capitol Hill staffers.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Microsoft may avoid an antitrust challenge to its OpenAI deal. The European Union won’t open a formal investigation into the $13 billion investment, because it doesn’t amount to a full takeover of the ChatGPT parent or give Microsoft control over the start-up’s future, according to Bloomberg. The deal still faces scrutiny from British and American antitrust regulators.

Google fires 28 workers after sit-ins protesting a contract with Israel. The dismissals came after dozens of employees took part in demonstrations against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal shared with Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing services. It’s the latest sign of deepening tension between Google employees and management over work for Israel in light of the war in Gaza.

The N.B.A. bars Jontay Porter over betting. The league found that the Toronto Raptors forward had tipped bettors about his health, limited participation in at least one game to control bets on his play and bet on N.B.A. games while he was in a lesser league. Porter is the first active player or coach to be expelled for gambling since 1954, and is a reminder of the risks that sports leagues are taking as they embrace betting.

The long road ahead for Musk’s mega-payout

Tesla got investors, and critics, talking on Wednesday after it asked shareholders to vote again on a $47 billion payout for Elon Musk that a Delaware judge had rejected because of how it was devised.

But while the proposals stirred up debate about the richest payday in the history of corporate America, there are still a lot of steps that need to be taken before Musk finally gets that money. If he ever does.

A reminder of what’s happening: Investors are being asked to re-approve the stock grant — which was overwhelmingly ratified in 2018 — after Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware said that Tesla’s board was too cozy with Musk. The plan always required Musk to meet a series of rising financial performance hurdles, which he did.

The vote, along with more disclosure about how the package was created, is meant to address that criticism.

It seems probable that the plan will be approved again. Four of Tesla’s 10 biggest shareholders, including T. Rowe Price, said they supported it. “We believe the 2018 plan demonstrated strong alignment with the interests of long-term investors, and it was followed by an impressive, validating period of value creation,” the mutual fund giant said.

Thousands of individual investors also voiced their support to the board and on X, Musk’s social network.

But Tesla must also successfully appeal McCormick’s decision. Until then, the package is still voided under Delaware law. Moreover, that appeal process won’t begin until after a July 8 hearing on the fee request by the lawyers for the shareholders who challenged the compensation package. (They’ve asked for $6 billion worth of Tesla stock.)

In the meantime, investors have other things to be concerned about. Tesla is set to report first-quarter earnings next week, and analysts and investors don’t have high hopes. The company has already said that sales fell sharply in the period — its first quarter-on-quarter drop since 2020 — and announced that it was laying off 10 percent of its employees.

Barclays on Wednesday cut its price target for Tesla’s stock by 20 percent, to $180; it closed at $155.45.

That goes toward the central question that the vote on Musk’s pay represents: Is he still the right person to lead Tesla? He has already threatened to turn his attention to his other companies if he isn’t given more voting control, but some investors and analysts are questioning his focus on cutting prices and on autonomous driving.

“This vote is the test that investors get to say which way they want to go,” Roger McNamee, a tech investor, said on CNBC.

A.I. is running out of power

The artificial intelligence boom isn’t slowing down, with the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC saying this morning that demand for its processors was “insatiable.”

But powering that activity may prove a big challenge, and tech executives are increasingly warning that electricity supplies need a boost.

A.I. requires huge amounts of electricity. The International Energy Agency estimated that global energy demand tied to the technology will more than double by 2026 — and power grids aren’t equipped to deal with that shift.

Spending could surpass $225 billion this year alone, according to Dgtl Infra, a research group. Analysts at Bank of America say power consumption by U.S. data centers will double in the next three to five years.

Tech giants are spending big on energy infrastructure, including nuclear and solar power. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s C.E.O., emphasized the company’s A.I. focus in his annual letter to investors last week. But he has warned that there’s “not enough energy right now” to power new generative A.I. services. Amazon says it’s in regular contact with U.S. officials about the power grid.

A.I. could also spur a geographic shift for tech. Virginia is a hub for data centers, but there will be growing pressure to find sites elsewhere as power supply gets strained there.

Bank of America analysts expect more data centers to be built alongside renewable energy plants in less congested areas such as the central and southeastern U.S., “where power capacity is underutilized, and power prices are lower.”

“I was ignored; I was told not to create delays; I was told, frankly, to shut up.”

— Sam Salehpour, a Boeing engineer turned whistle-blower, in a Senate hearing about the company’s safety protocols. Salehpour testified about a culture of retaliation against those who raised concerns; Boeing has said that it encourages employees to speak up.

Supply-chain detours for the Baltimore bridge

Three weeks after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge forced the closure of Baltimore’s port, America’s supply-chain industry is figuring out how to deal with the loss of a major hub for getting goods in, out and around the country.

Railways, truckers and shipping companies have found workarounds up and down the East Coast in an effort to avoid the kinds of snarls seen in 2021 and 2022. Other ports, including The Port of New York and New Jersey, are picking up some of the slack for cars, overseas goods and more.

But as The Times’s Peter Eavis reports, the disruption is still causing a lot of pain:

The trucking industry is under immense stress with executives saying they are struggling to get drivers and loads to where they are needed on time and without losing money.

Akram Ayyad, owner of 410 Transport, a Maryland trucking company, said that his costs had shot up because he now had to transport cargo farther, to the Port of New York and New Jersey instead of Baltimore, and that his customers were balking at having to pay more.

“We’re dying here,” he said.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

Policy

• The International Monetary Fund warned that the U.S. deficit — projected to hit 7.1 percent of G.D.P. next year — poses “significant risks” for the global economy. (FT)

• Donald Trump reportedly is weighing a middle-class tax cut if he wins re-election. (Reuters)

• Colorado became the first U.S. state to extend privacy rights to consumers’ brain data, which is increasingly coveted by tech companies. (NYT)

Best of the rest

• Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, testified to House lawmakers that she was taking strong action against antisemitism on her university’s campus. (NYT)

• “Universities Are Making Billions Gatekeeping Your Meds” (The Lever)

• The Indiana Fever, Caitlin Clark’s WNBA team, has a $1.2 million payroll. The lowest-paid N.B.A. benchwarmer earns $1.5 million. (Axios)

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