Member-only story
TikTok Proved Silicon Valley Is Done Innovating
It’s more interested in scooping up or blatantly copying its innovative rivals.
Welcome to Buy/Sell/Hold, Marker’s weekly newsletter that’s 100% business intelligence and 0% investment advice. Each week, our writers Steve LeVine and Rob Walker make sense of the most important developments in business right now — and give them a Buy for clever moves or positive trends, a Sell for mistakes or missed opportunities, or a Hold if they’re noteworthy but too early to call.
🏜️ TikTok and Silicon Valley’s innovation drought 🏜️
The Buy/Sell/Hold Analysis
About a month from now, TikTok — the Chinese-owned, video-sharing phenomenon — must sell its U.S. operations. Given the app’s 50 million daily users, this forced divestment by President Trump has ignited a frenzied auction now pitting tech giants Microsoft, Oracle, and Twitter against one another.
The White House and Big Tech are dressing up the TikTok saga as a combined story of national security and opportunistic capitalism amid unfortunate geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China. But the ultimatum to ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, is more accurately understood as a sordid window into Silicon Valley’s utter failure to…
