David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. If a foreign entity wants to come in and buy a massive AI company or a massive defense company. It makes sense that the government would say,"Well, let us look at this first." We have this really interesting scenario here where these are both Chinese companies. One with the presence of the US, but tons of users in the US and now close to two years after this acquisition got done, there's now politicians calling to institute [...]. Yeah. Formally, a CFIUS review has been opened on the Musicl.ly acquisition which is two years ago, it's already closed in the past, but when it was done, there was no CFIUS review. I mean, (a) because I think people weren't really thinking about this at that time, but also (b) as you say, it was a Chinese company. Super interesting. I mentioned Facebook. I think you know that all of what we said is true and these are really serious questions and potential problems and things for TikTok, the US government, the Chinese government, Bytedance, and all of the ecosystem to grapple with. At the same time, conveniently, who is out there fanning the flames of this fire and the controversy? Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Remember, 2016, Facebook almost bought Musical.ly and their number one priority, Zuck’s number one priority for that year was figure out how to enter China. Here we are in 2019, and Facebook is completely out of China and proud of it because they are under tons of political pressure (to put it mildly) here in the US. They also now have this emerging threat to their social network hegemony in the west with 800 million monthly active users in TikTok. November 2018, a year ago, Facebook launched Lasso which is their TikTok competitor. Their latest attempt to make a really jank independent app that's a copy of.…

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