TikTok’s woes won’t end after just 45 days
Happy Monday, Term Sheet readers!
It’s great to be back from vacation in the Catskills—though the news certainly has not taken a break.
TikTok is scrambling to hash together a plan B as President Donald Trump’s administration threatens to ban the app in the U.S. due to its Chinese ownership. Even as it negotiates a potential deal to sell its operations to Microsoft, TikTok is now planning to sue the Trump administration over the president’s executive order, per NPR.
Twitter is also now in the running to merge with TikTok’s U.S. operations, per the Wall Street Journal. But Microsoft is still in the lead to snap up parts of TikTok.
There’s good reason to fight the ban rather than try to go through with a merger: Finding a buyer is one thing—closing a deal and extricating TikTok from its Chinese operations in a way that satisfies Washington is a whole other ballpark. Deals of over $25 billion took an average of nine months to close, per a Gartner study, a timeline that lengthens depending on the complexity of the deal. And heck, if this deal is not complex, I don’t know what is.
So what happens to TikTok’s operations as it seeks to turn a potential breakup with Bytedance into reality over a course of at least several months?
Forty-five days is one timeline to watch: Another deadline to eye is the U.S. presidential election. U.S.-China geopolitical tensions have contributed to the pressure on TikTok, but domestic politics have also played a role. Trump, at one point, sought to ban TikTok outright, dismissing the idea of a sale to Microsoft. So why did he change his mind? Many in the Republican party worried a ban would alienate young voters ahead of the election, according to Reuters.
The Fortune Global 500: Fortune’s 2020 list of the top 500 companies in the world by revenue went live today. Included in the package is a fascinating story on India’s Jio Platforms, the mobile phone company that has lately garnered billions from Google, Facebook, KKR, and Silver Lake, and is now seeking to become the next big tech giant by capitalizing on the world’s second largest country by population.
Per the story, by my colleague Vivienne Walt: “Jio’s extraordinary season of fundraising might never have happened had it not been for a persistent complaint by [Mukesh] Ambani’s teenage twins that will sound familiar to any parent: The Internet was too slow to adequately run the sites other kids were consuming every day.”
I single out Jio because its story fits into the larger narrative of rising geopolitical tensions around the world: Smartphones made by Chinese company Xiaomi have become the market leader in recent years in India (though studies suggest smartphone penetration is still low—about a quarter of the population own one). Jio is now working with Google to build an entry-level smartphone. That news came as India itself has sought to distance itself from Chinese-backed companies.
Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com