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Part 4b: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The TikTok Deal

The Drey Dossier's avatar
The Drey Dossier
Sep 22, 2025

In 2022, ByteDance thought it had engineered the perfect peace offering. Project Texas would park all U.S. TikTok data on Oracle servers in Texas, with a fresh-cut subsidiary, TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc., standing between Washington and Beijing. ByteDance would still own the app, Oracle would play custodian, and Congress could claim it had fenced off the danger. It looked tidy on paper, and for a while that illusion held.

Then the mood changed. By April 2024, Washington replaced the babysitter model with a simple ultimatum. Divest or disappear. Project Texas never made it out of the nursery.

What followed in September 2025 was not a fix so much as a redesign of the American internet. An American consortium led by Oracle, with Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz at its shoulders, took roughly 80 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. ByteDance kept less than 20 percent and a single seat on a seven-member board. The numbers tell you one story. The network tells you another.

Oracle did more than lead the bid, it built the room. Silver Lake arrives with DNA from Oracle’s own house through David Roux. Andreessen Horowitz brings a portfolio that runs on Oracle’s cloud, which means shared incentives and easy alignment. Map the relationships and you get a board that looks plural, while decision gravity still pulls toward Redwood Shores. Oracle is no longer the landlord of TikTok’s data. It is the editor, the auditor, and the strategist for the feed that shapes how 170 million Americans see the world.

The Silicon Trade

Beijing’s sign-off should have been the hardest part. For years, Chinese regulators treated TikTok’s recommendation engine like a state artifact. No transfer, no deep inspection, no foreign hands on the dial. Then, suddenly, approval.

Look at the timing. In late August 2025, Nvidia and the Commerce Department arranged a path for cut-down AI chips to keep flowing into China. Not the crown-jewel H100s, but silicon strong enough to train real systems. Export-control lawyers called it a back door. Weeks later, China greenlit TikTok’s restructuring.

No memo will ever spell out the trade, but the rhythm is there. Access to training silicon on one side, consent to American leverage over a Chinese-born platform on the other. It was not diplomacy as press conference. It was the quiet arithmetic of power: you move on chips, we move on algorithms, everyone gets enough to claim a win and enough ambiguity to deny a bargain.

Manufacturing the Crisis

While the statecraft unfolded, Meta ran a parallel operation at home. In 2024, it poured $24.4 million into lobbying, and TikTok sat at the center of the storyboard. The message was simple, and it traveled well on local TV: TikTok is where the kids learn vandalism, assault, and drug stunts. Hearings followed, headlines followed, fear did the rest.

Only later did the details curdle. Several of those so-called TikTok challenges had incubated on Facebook first, then migrated across platforms the way rumors always do. The distinction did not survive the talking points.

The financial backdrop makes the theater obvious. Meta pulled in $18.4 billion from Chinese advertisers in 2024, roughly 11.2 percent of its revenue, a leap from 2021 that would make any growth team blush. Inside the company, an initiative called Project Aldrin explored how to crack China’s market, including scenarios that would have traded access for data. The public line warned of foreign surveillance. The private line asked for a seat at the table.

This was not national security, it was market security. Manufacture the panic, frame the rival as the threat, position yourself as the answer.

The Infrastructure of Influence

Deals like this do not land on capital alone. They need scaffolding, the narrative and institutional wiring that makes a transfer of power feel like a public good.

Meta brought the panic. Oracle brought credibility with the national security state. The company’s origin story is fused to American intelligence databases, and the relationship has matured into a long habit of defense contracting and access. During the Gaza war, Larry Ellison’s donations to the IDF and Oracle’s work on AI targeting systems put the company’s name in the same sentences as live-fire software. Soon after, TikTok’s trust and safety teams began drawing more alumni from Israel’s Unit 8200, veterans trained to treat information as an operational terrain.

This is not coincidence. This is the migration of wartime information doctrine into civilian feeds, a transfer of methods rather than a change of mission. Silver Lake’s presence tightens the loop. It financed David Ellison’s Skydance, it sits now inside TikTok’s ownership, and it keeps Oracle’s reach intact even when the branding looks independent.

The Next Generation Proxy

David Ellison appears in stories like this as a Hollywood executive with his own politics. That is the surface. In practice, he functions as a family relay, the person who steps forward when the heat is on and the filings need a different name. The Paramount saga made it plain. Scrutiny rose, Larry’s name receded, David became the voting controller, and the narrative shifted to a generational handoff. Control never left the building.

Skydance’s financing history shows the flexibility. In 2016, Tencent money came in and Beijing’s sensitivities found their way into creative decisions. Top Gun: Maverick’s jacket lost the Taiwanese and Japanese patches in early cuts. Only public pushback restored them. At the same time, the Pentagon provided hardware and script oversight, turning the movie into entertainment that doubled as recruitment on-ramps. Bend for China, bend for the Pentagon, keep the runway clear.

The Feedback Machine

What the TikTok deal really builds is a loop. Intelligence hires feed policy, policy shapes product, product shapes perception, perception drives politics, politics clears deals, deals enrich the same network that hires the same people who write the next round of policy. The five-year CFIUS process that looked like delay functioned as compound interest. Time created leverage, leverage created inevitability.

Research pointing to algorithmic bias toward Beijing’s interests fits the pattern. So do new community rules with a crisis switch, language that allows exceptional enforcement during unrest. Footage of police escalation can vanish in the fog of “misinformation.” The lines move when the stakes rise.

Money completes the circuit. Political donations arrive where they are most efficient, often from investors sitting on enormous ByteDance exposure. Economic dependency does the rest. Millions of creators, billions in measured GDP impact, a constituency that looks grassroots but is really payroll. Protect the app, protect the income, protect the owners.

This is not random corruption. It is system design. The machine tightens with every turn.

Closing the Circle

Follow every path and you return to Oracle and the Ellisons. The panic, the process, the purchase, the staffing, the rules that govern the feed. Larry controls the servers and the audits, David fronts the acquisitions and absorbs the spotlight, the rest of the network stays comfortably in the penumbra. The story about independence, the one that casts David as a different generation with different values, works as performance. It distributes attention while centralizing authority.

TikTok is not just an app anymore. It is proof of concept. A template for absorbing essential systems by staging a crisis, then arriving as the responsible adult with a term sheet and a security badge. Today the feed. Tomorrow health records, payments, or whatever network captures enough dependence to become indispensable.

If you think controlling the information bloodstream is audacious, wait until the same architecture wraps itself around the physical one. Your biometrics, your medical history, your genome. The companies that shape what you see are positioning to shape what defines you.

The bloodstream runs deeper than social media. Part 5 follows where it goes.

Resources & Links

Government & Legal Documents

Reporting: The TikTok restructuring, buyers, and Project Texas

Reporting: Chips, export controls, and the Nvidia timeline

Reporting: Meta, lobbying, revenue ties to China, and whistleblower coverage

Investigations, think-tanks, and watchdog reporting (infrastructure, algorithmic influence)

  • Network Contagion / academic-style research on platform moderation & geopolitical bias — for claims about algorithmic suppression of criticism of China vs other platforms, consult peer and policy research outlets (example trackers and institute reports; use these to source the “algorithmic bias” claim in your draft). (Searchable examples exist across academic and policy outlets—if you want, I can assemble a formal shortlist targeted to your paragraph.) https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-42300855-5e19-4a86-a933-aa17d64bb41d?utm

Corporate & other primary evidence

Background & network pieces (Ellison, Oracle, Unit 8200, Skydance/Tencent)

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