Business
With Trump as president, can TikTok in the U.S. survive?
The fate of TikTok in the U.S. has been up in the air since 2020, when President Donald Trump moved to ban the popular video app because of national security concerns.
That set off four years of back-and-forth between the app’s Chinese owners and the U.S. government, with a possible ban scheduled to go into effect one day before Trump’s inauguration in January.
One hitch: Trump recently changed his mind, joining TikTok in June and posting on social media, “Those who want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump.”
“We’re not doing anything with TikTok,” he said.
That has given some creators hope.
“The fact that Trump did a whole 180 and wants to wait and reassess how everything is going with TikTok — I think we’re going to be OK,” said creator Kat Vera, 34, who posts fitness and car content and has 457,000 followers on TikTok.
But there are factors that complicate the app’s position. Several legal experts and tech industry observers said the path forward for TikTok is still precarious.
“It’s just a huge mess, and it isn’t clear,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
In April, Biden signed a law passed by Congress that would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its ownership of TikTok by Jan. 19 or face a ban in the U.S. due to security concerns about the app’s ties to China.
Biden has the option to extend ByteDance’s deadline, but some legal experts said that is unlikely. Changing the law would require approval by Congress, they said. Instead, some believe that the matter could be settled in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
TikTok and ByteDance sued the U.S. government in May, alleging that banning the app would violate 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech and that the new law “offers no support for the idea” that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses national security risks.
Experts said they expect that the court will make a decision next month. If the court rules in favor of TikTok and ByteDance, then the law will be declared unconstitutional and the government is unlikely to appeal under the incoming Trump administration.
But if the court rules against the app and the tech giant, they could appeal to the Supreme Court and ask to have the new law paused, said Michael Stovsky, a partner at law firm Benesch in Cleveland.
“They’re gonna probably ask the court to say, ‘Look, don’t enforce the law. Don’t require it to divest until the Supreme Court has heard the case,” Stovsky said.
Representatives for TikTok and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.
In a court filing, TikTok and ByteDance said that they’ve tried to work with the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment to address security concerns since 2019.
Under the terms of a deal spelled out in a 90-page draft agreement, data collected about TikTok users in the U.S. was to be handled by U.S. tech giant Oracle. The proposed agreement also called for Oracle to inspect TikTok’s programming code for vulnerabilities and for the platform’s content to be subject to independent monitoring.
If TikTok did not comply, the draft agreement called for financial penalties and also included the possibility of suspending TikTok’s operations in the U.S. TikTok and ByteDance said it‘s unclear why the committee ultimately determined the proposed agreement was insufficient.
Meanwhile, Trump has changed his tune about TikTok, at least in part for apparently personal reasons and his animus for the app’s rivals. Earlier this year he called himself a “big star on TikTok.”
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in March, referring to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook’s parent company, Meta. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Republican leaders have accused the social media site of censoring conservative viewpoints, which Facebook refuted, saying it has guidelines that “do not permit the suppression of political perspectives.”
Trump, who has 14.6 million followers on TikTok, joined the popular video app months after he met with Jeff Yass, a ByteDance investor, major Republican party donor and co-founder and managing partner of Susquehanna International Group, but Trump told CNBC they did not discuss TikTok.
People who had worked for Trump also have joined TikTok’s cause. Club for Growth, a conservative economic organization, hired former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway to advocate for TikTok in Congress, according to Politico.
But the Trump administration will have to deal with differing viewpoints within the Republican party on TikTok, with some preferring a hard line toward China.
“I think it’s going to become a chip in a much larger game involving tariffs with China, security agreements, all that, and that TikTok is going to be part of a bigger equation,” said Freddy Tran Nager, associate director of USC Annenberg’s Digital Social Media master’s program.
TikTok has a significant presence in Culver City, employing roughly 440 people there, according to city estimates. The company, which has 170 million U.S. users, has been a significant tool for promoting content by video creators, small businesses, music artists and Hollywood studios.
Earlier this year, TikTok notified the state of California that it would lay off 58 employees in Culver City in July “due to restructuring.” Positions affected included senior business analysts and global product specialists.
Many creators have already diversified into publishing their content on other platforms, so they aren’t solely reliant on TikTok. Some say the money-making opportunities are better on rival services.
Theodora Moutinho, a fitness creator and actress from Glendale, said she has learned to always adapt in the fast-changing world of social media.
The 25-year-old became a creator in 2017 and today has 4.2 million followers on Instagram, 1.3 million on TikTok and 421,000 on Snapchat. These days, she’s putting more effort into her Snapchat and Instagram accounts, while keeping an eye on newer platforms such as Bluesky.
“Ever since it was up in the air that they were going to take it off, not take it off, I kind of stopped really focusing on it,” Moutinho said of TikTok. “Because why try to grow something if it might come down?”
Times news researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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