Great American Patriots*
The Corruption Chronicles
* American or American-adjacent. If you count Israel too. And the United Arab Emirates.
When Donald Trump took advantage of what can only be described as the willful indifference of millions of American voters and won a second term in the White House there were many, myself included, that were convinced that we were about to see the most corrupt US administration in our lifetimes, if not ever. A Trump administration without the pesky guardrails provided by the serious people that he put in his first admin practically guaranteed that Dear Leader would look to grab as much as he could this time around. He has not disappointed and in fact the sheer amount of grift in just his first year back in office is legendary and likely dwarfs what even the most fearful of us imagined.
The TikTok deal runs the full spectrum from lawlessness to grift. We already covered the former, so let’s dive into the latter now.
What’s the Grift?
The stated reason for forcing TikTok’s sale was foreign influence. Specifically, we were told that a social media platform used by more than 150 million Americans could not be trusted in the hands of a foreign government with an agenda; one that might quietly shape what those Americans see, believe, and share. There were also very real concerns about data security and privacy for those who loved to share their dance videos with their friends and family. These were legitimate issues and the bipartisan legislation that forced a sale or ban of TikTok intended to alleviate those concerns.
Enter Donald Trump.
On December 16th, 2024, TikTok filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to delay the implementation of the ban. On that same day CEO Shou Chew met with the president-elect at Mar A Lago; a meeting that Chew had been trying to have since the election.
Think about that: the CEO of a company that was facing a government-mandated sale or ban in the United States was able to meet privately with the president-elect. Just over a month later, on his first day in office, Trump ended the ban that had gone into effect the day prior.
Trump’s actions make what actually happened worth examining carefully. After the delay of the ban was extended several times via Executive Order, TikTok’s U.S. operations were handed to a consortium of investors that Trump called “a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World.” (emphasis mine) The new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, is comprised of three managing investors that own 45% of the company as well as a handful of smaller partners whose share is about 35%. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, retains a 19.9% stake in the new company. Even more interesting is the price tag. Reports from Axios state that USDS paid $14 billion to ByteDance in the deal. TikTok has generated American ad revenue in the neighborhood of $10-12 billion a year, and that number is trending up. We’ll come back to that little nugget.
The three managing investors, each owning a 15% share, are Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Abu Dhabi-based MGX. The venture has a a seven-member board1 that will exercise authority over content moderation and algorithm management for one of the most powerful media platforms on Earth. The managing investor with the most consequential role is Oracle, whose executive chairman Larry Ellison will oversee TikTok’s algorithm and data management. Oracle has documented, ongoing, and institutional ties to the government of Israel. Its CEO has made those ties explicit company policy. Its executives ran Israeli government influence operations on TikTok specifically, before the ink on the ownership deal was dry. And several of the other investors in the consortium are connected, directly or through close associates, to Donald Trump’s own financial orbit, to Israel, or to both.
Remember, we were told we were solving a foreign influence problem.
Who’s In on It?
Oracle
Let’s start with Oracle’s Larry Ellison, as through his acquisitions during this administration he is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful private citizens in the world. He is also, by most reasonable measures, Benjamin Netanyahu’s most prominent American ally outside of elected office.
The relationship is not subtle. Ellison offered Netanyahu a board seat at Oracle in 2021. That same year, Netanyahu and his family vacationed on Lānaʻi, the Hawaiian island that Ellison owns. Ellison has made contributions exceeding $26 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces2 including what was at the time the largest single donation ($16.6 million in 2017) in that organization’s history. Israeli media has described Ellison as a personal confidant of the Israeli Prime Minister.
Oracle’s institutional commitment to Israel runs just as deep as its founder’s personal one. In 2021, Oracle became the first multinational technology company to offer cloud services in Israel, establishing a $319 million data center in Jerusalem. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, CEO Safra Catz, who is herself and Israeli American, ordered the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” displayed on all company screens in more than 180 countries. She later told an Israeli business outlet: “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”
Now, to be fair, none of that on its own constitutes corruption. It is not illegal to support a foreign government. It is not illegal to donate to military charities or host foreign leaders on your private island. Obviously, these are levers of power that are simply unattainable for the masses, but not corrupt.
That said, when you consider what Oracle was doing before the ban became law, the plot thickens.
According to an investigation by The Intercept based on internal Slack messages, Oracle employees were running an influence operation on TikTok on behalf of the Israeli government as far back as late 2023. The project, called “Words of Iron,” was developed in collaboration with Israeli government ministries with the explicit goal of elevating pro-Israel content and countering critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Shimon Levy, head of communications at Oracle Israel, praised employees leading this initiative as providing “an important volunteering initiative to develop and operate a unique tool” for Israeli public relations on social media.
Read that again.
Oracle, one of the companies that was charged with protecting Americans from foreign influence operations on the most-used social media platform in America, was running a foreign government’s content promotion operation on that same platform before the deal closed. In fact, they were doing it before the legislation even passed. The company tasked with keeping foreign influence out of TikTok had already been letting foreign influence in through the back door.
I have to stop here for a moment… Look, I realize that I am an outlier. I fully understand that most folks don’t have the time, the inclination, the mental health reserves, the whatever to spend as much time looking at this stuff as I do. Hell, I often wish that I DIDN’T spend so much time on this shit. But for fuck’s sake, how does stuff like this seem to happen every damned day and no one is calling it out? How do we as a country send billions of taxpayer dollars to a country that is not poor, that has free healthcare and free college. How do we let this country dictate our global foreign relations? How are we not raising all sorts of holy hell over here?3
For fuck’s sake, Netanyahu himself said the quiet part out loud, stating “We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged in and the most important ones are on social media”. He went on to say that the purchase of TikTok by USDS was “the most important purchase going on right now.”
Good thing we are eliminating that foreign influence.
The other managing investors
Silver Lake’s co-CEO Egon Durban sits on TikTok’s new seven-member board. Durban’s ties to Trump’s inner circle are financial and direct: in 2025, Silver Lake partnered with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund along with Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner on the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, the largest private equity buyout in history. Silver Lake also owns the parent company of the UFC and WWE, both of which are personal enthusiasms of the president4. Again, it’s not corruption to know the president’s son in law5 but it sure is interesting that a firm that will have direct access to the TikTok algorithm just happened to partner with Kushner and the Saudis on the EA buyout.
Perhaps the most direct slap in the face of the Americans who are paying attention is the inclusion of MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based AI investment firm which is chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Al Nahyan is the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser. This is not a passive institutional investor. This is a sitting national security official of a foreign government with a seat on the board of America’s largest social media platform. By the way, keep an eye out for a future piece detailing how the UAE straight-up bribed the Trump family. Great American Patriots, amirite?
The junior partners
A little over one-third of USDS is owned by a collection of “lesser” investors. A couple of them piqued my interest as well.
Michael Dell has been a vocal supporter of Trump for some time. Earlier this year he and his wife pledged $6.25 billion to help start the Trump Accounts program, a “donation” that was announced in the Oval Office. That’s a pretty expensive photo op. Dell, like Oracle’s Ellison, is also very supportive of Israel. In fact, they both donated to the Friends of the IDF booster club on the same night back in 2014, with the Dells giving $1.8 million to Ellison’s $10 million. Additionally, Dell’s Foundation has its own dedicated page describing their contributions to Israel. Again, giving to a foreign government is neither illegal nor corrupt, but the tangled web that connects these owners can’t just be hand-waved away either.
Vastmere Strategic Investments (Susquehanna International Group) is a company co-founded by Jeff Yass, who was very instrumental in flipping GOP folks from their criticisms of TikTok. Trump’s about-face on TikTok, discussed in the Lawless Leadership piece, came just one week after Yass invited Trump to attend a Club for Growth retreat. Club For Growth is a Political Action Committee where Yass has donated more than $60 million since 2016. In 2025 Yass donated $16 million to MAGA Inc., Trump’s PAC. All of these donations are, unfortunately, well within the law thanks to SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling, although the scope and breadth of Yass’ donations is quite interesting when coupled with the fact that Susquehanna has a major investment in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
How Much Are We Talking Here?
The corruption present in this deal is a bit harder to quantify than many of Trump’s other schemes. The financial corruption in this deal is real, but it does not reduce neatly to a single number. What was sold, to whom, and at what price is where the story begins, but the magnitude of what happened here extends well beyond the transaction itself.
Let’s start with the valuation. As mentioned before, USDS is paying about $14 billion for the American side of the business. Analyst estimates put TikTok’s annual U.S. advertising revenue alone at roughly the same figure. In other words, Trump’s allies purchased the most-watched social media platform in America for what amounts to approximately one year of its ad revenue. That is not a market price. Sure, distressed assets sell at discounts. This one sold at a discount that would embarrass a clearance rack. And, really, how distressed was TikTok, really, when Trump was running interference for it? The application was protected by the Office of the President and a Department of Justice that has abandoned any pretense of independence. Every company that supports TikTok, whether with technology resources or marketplace availability received a get out of jail free card signed by AG Pam Bondi.
Who benefits from this less-than-market-rate transaction? It’s pretty clear to me that not only have some of the richest people in the United States been gifted a money-printing machine for pennies on the dollar, but by doing so the president has created some pretty significant favors that he can call in at his leisure. I am sure there is nothing to be concerned about though, what with the guy being such a paragon of moral fiber.
Beyond the price, consider what was actually purchased. Per CNN, "The US joint venture will also be responsible for content moderation for US users." The importance of this cannot be underestimated. TikTok is used over 150 million Americans. That is essentially half of all of the United States. Pew Research found that about 37% of American adults use the application, and that over 6 in 10 young adults (under 30) are on the app. Finally, just over half of US adults (55%) say they regularly get their news there.
Given the broad reach of the platform in the United States, it’s not a long walk to see how consolidating the ownership of the application (and control of its algorithm) can be detrimental to American democracy. The democratic damage compounds when you account for the full picture of what the Ellison family now controls. Ellison’s son David acquired Paramount, parent company of CBS News, in August 2025. Larry Ellison then finalized a $150 million acquisition of The Free Press, installing its founder Bari Weiss as top editor of CBS News. Weiss wasted no time in gutting the newsroom at CBS and effectively killing its flagship program 60 Minutes.
It gets worse.
For several months Netflix had been poised to buy Warner Brothers / Discovery (WBD), which owns CNN and several other media heavyweights including HBO, The Discovery Channel, DC Studios, and many more. Thing is, the Ellisons wanted it, and the Ellisons have the President in their pocket corner. So guess what happened? Yep, WBD accepted Paramount’s superior offer instead — a bid that included Paramount picking up the $2.8 billion termination fee that WBD owed Netflix for walking away.
One family, who has both donated to the President and benefitted greatly from his decisions, now owns an extraordinary percentage of the American knowledge landscape.
TikTok’s algorithm.
CBS News.
CNN.
Warner Brothers Studios.
HBO.
Paramount’s film and cable properties.
And so, so much more.
This is not a media portfolio. This is an infrastructure project.
And it was assembled with the active assistance of a president who delayed TikTok’s legal deadline five separate times while the deal came together. A president who openly campaigned against Netflix’s attempted purchase of WBD. A president whose allies are now the beneficiaries of a below-market acquisition of the most powerful content distribution platform in the country. Does anyone really believe that Trump will waste any time calling in his favors when he feels his optics need a glow up?
The Last Word
There is a version of this story where the TikTok deal was a reasonable solution to a genuine national security problem. In that version, the U.S. government identified a platform with foreign government exposure, forced a divestiture to American owners, and the problem was resolved.
That version requires you to not look too closely at the owners.
What we actually have is a deal in which the President of the United States repeatedly delayed enforcement of the law in order to allow his preferred ownership group to get organized and make a “reasonable” bid for TikTok, further cementing a pro-Israeli right-wing tilt in the American media landscape. Maybe this is just the way the world works. Perhaps deals like this happen all the time and we are just now “seeing how the sausage is made.” But damn if this doesn’t fill me with a sense of futility, a “how the hell do we peasants compete?” attitude.
The original sin of TikTok was that a foreign government might quietly shape American public opinion through an algorithm Americans didn’t know was being managed in their interests.
We have not solved that problem. We just changed the countries pulling the strings.
Take care and stay strong, together.
The full composition of the board is quite interesting as well:
- Shou Chew, the Chinese CEO of TikTok (American Patriot)
- Timothy Dattels - Senior Adviser to TPG Global
- Mark Dooley - Managing Director at Susquehanna International Group
- Egon Durban - Co-CEO of Silver Lake
- Raul Fernandez - President and Chief Executive Officer of DXC Technology
- Kenneth Gluek - Executive Vice President at Oracle
- David Scott - Chief Strategy and Safety Officer at MGX
Is this some sort of Army Man Booster Organization, like the ones that used to slide bags of cash to college football recruits? Does the Israeli military not get enough cash and materiel directly from the US taxpayer?
I know. Trust me, I know. God forbid you point this stuff out. No one wants the 21st century Scarlet A on their chest. (Or would it be blue?)
After last year’s wet fart of a grand military parade, Trump is planning on hosting a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House to celebrate his 80th birthday. Hey, they have plenty of room for bleachers, what with there being no East Wing anymore…
You would think that MAGA would be wailing about this blatant nepotism like they did about Hunter Biden. Well, you wouldn’t, because hypocrisy is almost as important to these cretins as cruelty.