ByteDance Concepts

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance

by Matthew Brennan · 9 Oct 2020 · 282pp · 63,385 words

work. Opinions, interpretations, and theoretical frameworks expressed in this book represent my own views, except in cases when explicitly attributed otherwise. As of writing, ByteDance is a privately held company under no obligation to release audited financial information or user numbers. Quantitative data points in this book may deviate from

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section of this book Video footage of presentations and in-depth interviews Analyst reports and academic papers Relevant social media accounts Extensive personal use of ByteDance’s product suite, both Chinese and international The base foundation of knowledge regarding the Chinese mobile internet industry gained through years on the ground in

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their behavior alone—was at the very heart of TikTok. It was the key to understanding the success of the app and its parent company, ByteDance. ByteDance had been the earliest Chinese internet company to go “all in” on the then-nascent technology and commit to the daunting task of building a

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is worth noting the juxtaposition between Yiming’s conservative personal life and his entrepreneurial career’s daring ambition. Many years later, Yiming would insist that ByteDance, contrary to public impression, is a “romantic” company, his definition of romance being “turning imagination into reality—to face reality and change it.” Despite

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staying up late together finishing assignments. A handful of his Nankai friends, the most notable being his university dormitory roommate Liang Rubo, joined Yiming at ByteDance years later. Studying computers and programming together, the two forged a deep friendship, sharing a PC and playing badminton together every weekend. Yiming held

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already Yiming’s fourth entrepreneurial venture in six years. The exposure to such various working environments, technologies, and products greatly influenced his later work at ByteDance. Yiming had worked across multiple verticals, from enterprise software to travel and real estate. He had soaked up practical technical knowledge around operating content portals

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was widely revered. The “app economy” of internet services delivered through smartphone devices was Job’s brainchild and the infrastructure on top of which ByteDance would build its entire business. Goofy Pics During early 2012 Yiming had become utterly obsessed with thinking about data mining and information recommendation, researching all

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first app entitled “Hilarious Goofy Pics,” 44 which served up an endless addictive feed of entertaining memes and silly pictures. Above: 2012 screenshot of ByteDance’s first app Hilarious Goofy Pics A second app entitled “Implied Jokes” 45 quickly followed with similar positioning focusing on internet memes. Implied Jokes turned

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rapid experimentation. Quickly push new ideas out, test multiple features, and let the market verify which has value - this became an enduring strategy of ByteDance. Above: screenshots from several of the apps reveal their similar structure Above: the early factory production line system for generating apps fast Given the considerable

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including prestigious financial firms and other established internet companies that could also provide strategic resources such as access to data and users. Despite many rumors, ByteDance avoided the fate of falling under the influence of one of the traditional big three giants of China’s internet industry, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent

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algorithm that increased the accuracy of their video recommendation by 10% 2011 – YouTube introduces machine learning algorithmic recommendation engine, Sibyl, with immediate impact 2012 Aug – ByteDance launches news aggregation app Toutiao 2012 Sep t – AlexNet breakthrough at the ImageNet challenge triggers a global explosion of interest in AI 2013 Mar – Facebook

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accurate and fast input. Passive methods of content distribution are, in general, more suitable for the fragmented time and small screens of smartphones. Before starting ByteDance, Yiming had already built deep practical experience with many methods of content distribution. Kuxun (2006-2008), a travel search engine, Fanfou (2008-2009), a

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on people’s interests. The global landscape Applying this framework of internet informational distribution to look at the global market shortly after the founding of ByteDance reveals companies like Facebook were already embracing recommendation. “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world.” 89

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superior, the technology would be copied. It was not a sustainable way to win a long term meaningful share of an already crowded, competitive market. ByteDance was about to prove them wrong. * * * 69 https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-brain-algorithm-video-recommendation-personalized-feed 70

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to make recommendation engines and many failed.” 93 Sheer determination and self-study proved somewhat useful, but in the end, the significant breakthroughs for ByteDance came as a direct result of acquiring outside talent. Only by luring in experienced expertise from other organizations could Yiming hope to realize the vision

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expertise had reached such a level by 2016 that they could experiment with methods to algorithmically generate content. During that year’s Olympics, a ByteDance-developed bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events faster than traditional media and enjoying engagement levels comparable to articles produced by human

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writers. Recommendation systems became ByteDance’s core technology, underpinning everything from short videos on TikTok to articles in Toutiao through to comedy GIFs on their app Neihan duanzi (Insider jokes

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across China. The first key accounts they secured came from Lidong’s old work relationships in Beijing with car manufacturers. A sizable chunk of ByteDance’s entire workforce consists of salespeople and staff focused on commercialization overseen by Lidong. His teams would sell ads and develop commercialization strategies for all

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restaurants was ubiquitous. Mobile phone screens were becoming larger with improved resolution. The conditions were falling into place for mobile video content to thrive. For ByteDance, this would be the beginning of a new era that would completely redefine the company. * * * 91 The book (Chinese only) can be found here

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The strategy turned the field into a new battleground for subsidies. Billions of yuan were being thrown around to entice production studios and talented creators. ByteDance entered the fray relatively late. There were dozens of Chinese apps that had already introduced new ways of consuming videos, including local adaptations of Vine

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, professional production houses and fashion mega-influencers, through to rural farmers recording from the fields, China’s short video market held something for everyone. ByteDance’s flagship app Toutiao was already featuring short videos, which were experiencing an explosion in usage. Over the first quarter of 2016, the average time

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into promoting Huoshan Video as it followed a locally proven model and competed head-on with a thriving domestic competitor, Kuaishou. Above: three apps comprised ByteDance’s new short video strategy (Xigua, Huoshan, and A.me) and their original counterparts (YouTube, Kuaishou, and Musical.ly). The responsibility to manage the

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was coming in from all over the company—people, money, user traffic, celebrity endorsements, brand collaborations, and most importantly, full integration and optimization of ByteDance’s powerful recommendation engine. Chinese stars with massive fan bases such as Yang Mi, Lu Han, Kris Wu, and Angelababy opened accounts, joining in publicity

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campaigns, and a nationwide “Douyin Party” event roadshow was planned. Douyin had become the hottest upcoming app in China. ByteDance ramped up the investment in all three short video products, including Douyin. People, resources, and advertising budget were all raised, leading an industry insider to

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benefiting greatly from the access to technical expertise, money, and infrastructural systems, most startups could only dream of. Yet, due to the unique way ByteDance is organized, the support received by Douyin was undoubtedly more significant than the well-known case studies of Instagram or WeChat. Douyin (and later TikTok

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reinstall the app when they upgrade their device with little consequence. Constantly releasing and testing new products is an effective way to mitigate this risk. ByteDance was set up to reinvent itself continually. Above: each new app benefits from the shared technology stack, and resources are allocated based on performance.

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, even the color pallet was similar. Above right: A screenshot of the updated 2018 Weishi shows its striking resemblance to Douyin. Tencent completely blocked ByteDance from purchasing any form of online advertisement on their platforms. Additionally, Weishi signed a handful of young celebrities 214 to post videos exclusively on its

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, step by step, overtaking the previous market leaders. Dominating social had gifted the company a sustainable unfair advantage over competitors—low-cost distribution channels. ByteDance now enjoyed the same low-cost distribution advantage. Given gaming was one of China’s most lucrative online services, it would surely only be a

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with zero marketing spend. 224 By the second half of 2017, Douyin had proved itself in China. Sophisticated technologies, including video analysis, AR filters, and ByteDance’s proprietary recommendation engine, had laid the foundations for rapid growth. In theory, at least, these technologies transcended geographical boundaries, but the team needed to

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early June 2018, according to TikTok Japan staff. Globalize products; localize content A similar story to Japan was playing out in other Asian countries as ByteDance tested the waters and refined their systematic playbook. TikTok’s early markets were Asian, including Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. At the same time,

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videos based on user profile tagging. This basic concept was able to create a compelling experience across all cultures. In one interview, Yiming described the ByteDance approach as to “globalize products and localize content.” Standardized elements – universal across all markets Branding : the TikTok name, logo, and distinctive visual identity UX,

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our competitors were all American companies, and we hardly felt any competitive pressure. But since last year, we began to compete with Chinese companies, including ByteDance, whether in market operation or the speed of product iteration, there’s an order of magnitude difference with American companies.” 242 Musical.ly struggles to

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the format proved popular and effective. Above: the estimated 2019 revenue breakdown of Douyin. 245 Another monetization method is platform commissions from “Star-Chart,” 246 ByteDance’s official influencer data management platform. Brands that wish to work with influencers on Douyin must run their campaigns through Star-Chart or risk having

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target. Western markets are potentially lucrative but difficult to enter. Musical.ly had built a meaningful brand that resonated strongly with American and European teens. ByteDance, Facebook, Tencent, Snapchat, 250 and Kuaishou, had all expressed interest at various times and engaged in talks with the founders. Sometimes referred to as

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removed from the Play store in February 2020. 254 http://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2017-11-19/doc-ifynwnty4928120.shtml 255 https://hans.vc/ByteDance-musical-ly-merger/ 256 https://youtu.be/YsPeT2oHQLY?t=2098 257 Data source: Cheetah Global Labs, Musical.ly Chapter 8 CRINGE!!! “Musical.ly disappeared,

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com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/2132434/chinas-rich-list-2018-who-are-nations-wealthiest-man-and 259 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-musically/chinas-bytedance-scrubs-musical-ly-brand-in-favor-of-tiktok-idUSKBN1KN0BW 260 Demonstration videos Mindie, Dec 2013 https://youtu.be/ibjbxRBMI30?t=175 Musical.ly June

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order of anglicized names. Chinese is followed by pinyin romanization in bracket s. ALEX HOFMANN, former Musical.ly president of North America, left after the ByteDance acquisition ALEX ZHU 朱骏 ( z hūjùn) , co-founder of Musical.ly, later CEO of TikTok ALLEN ZHANG 张小龙 (zhāngxiǎolóng ), founder of WeChat and Foxmail, senior executive

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’s algorithmic recommendation capabilities CLEMENT RAFFENOUX, co-founder and chief product officer of Mindie ERICH ANDERSEN, former chief intellectual property IP consultant of Microsoft, joined ByteDance as global general counsel in 2020 FU SHENG 傅盛 (fù shèng), an early investor in Musical.ly and CEO of Cheetah Mobile. Held veto power

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same year. KINOSHITA YUKINA, the first well known Japanese celebrity to endorse TikTok LIANG RUBO 梁汝波 (liángrǔbō), Yiming’s close friend and roommate at Nankai university, ByteDance employee no. three, held various senior technical roles, later shifting to focus on HR LIL NAS X (MONTERO LAMAR HILL), American songwriter. Creator of “

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Kuaishou, currently an investment partner at Gaorong Capital LIU ZHEN 柳甄 (liǔ zhēn), former head of strategy for Uber China, later responsible for international strategy at ByteDance. Niece of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi LOUIS YANG 阳陆育 (yáng lù yù), co-founder of Musical.ly MADRAC ZHU 祝子楠 (zhùzi nán), former vice president at

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staff. VP of the recommendation algorithm business, joined 2014, having previously worked at Baidu for nine years YURI MILNER, Russian investor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, early ByteDance investor ZACH KING, a popular visual illusion video creator, currently operates one of the most popular accounts on TikTok ZHANG HANPING 张汉平 (zhānghànpíng), father of Zhang

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Yiming ZHANG LIDONG 张利东 (zhānglìdōng), chairman of ByteDance China, joined 2013. A former journalist and vice president at Beijing Times newspaper ZHANG YI 张祎 (zhāng yī), The second product manager of Douyin ZHANG YIMING

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张一鸣 (zhāngy īmíng), CEO and founder of ByteDance ZHOU BINGJUN 周秉俊 (zhōubǐngjùn), former Musical.ly vice president of operations ZHOU HONGYI 周鸿祎 (zhōuhóngyī), co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of the Internet security company Qihoo

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than you 2019-02-16 https://medium.com/@ming_ma/how-to-work-with-people-who-are-10-years-younger-than-you-71cd378b30e Chapter 2: ByteDance – The Early Years 沸腾新十年 | 少年今日头条的奇幻漂流 - 左林右狸 2019-07-17 https://new.qq.com/omn/20190718/20190718A07TPH00.html? 张一鸣也无法定义 SIG和王琼 2019-12-28 https://www.cmtzz.cn/news/29846 中国程序员英雄传(五)：张一鸣：码农

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global

by Rebecca Fannin · 2 Sep 2019 · 269pp · 70,543 words

Road in size and impact, and measures up with mega-financings, and growing share of unicorn-financed startups globally.11,12 Chinese digital content app ByteDance ranks first as the world’s most valuable privately held startup.13 •Tencent’s and Alibaba’s rank in the top ten publicly traded companies

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posted its first quarterly loss in 2019 since a 2005 listing. There’s a new B on the horizon: the world’s highest-valued unicorn, ByteDance, which is taking on Tencent with internationally popular video app TikTok and a new video messaging app. Table 1-1 Comparing China’s BAT with

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friends. Facebook also relaunched short video app Lasso, described in China tech circles as a “100 percent” copy of the Chinese-created TikTok app from ByteDance. China’s massive $9 trillion mobile payments market led by Alibaba and Tencent is light-years ahead of the United States.5,6 Nearly everyone

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own app. WeChat’s brightest days could be fading since there is always something new in China’s mobile universe. To wit, fired-up competitor ByteDance has launched a video chat app with built-in private messaging, Duoshan, to take on WeChat. The growth of WeChat is slowing, naturally, since it

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venture capital at lofty valuations in the billions of dollars stratosphere. Two, Xiaomi and Meituan Dianping, have already gone public, in 2018. Next could be ByteDance, the aggressive maker of AI-powered news app Toutiao and short-video app TikTok. Didi may take longer (see more on Didi in chapter 7

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to invent the livestreaming business model of making money by taking a chunk of revenue from promotional agencies and from fans virtual gifts to performers. BYTEDANCE: The New “B” In today’s fast-moving and intense digital markets, a new, shorter form of livestreaming—15-second music video selfies—has popped

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up. It’s popularized by Chinese upstart ByteDance, the most valuable startup in the world and a new challenger to Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat, and Tencent, as well as YY

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. ByteDance founder and serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming has a knack for anticipating content trends and leveraging artificial intelligence to bring news and entertainment to an entirely

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them that gets more precise with each use. His video and news apps have a following globally, which means that his content platform startup named ByteDance could be China’s first global internet success story. It was back in 2012, when Zhang cranked up his flagship product, a news app called

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’s website, “combine the power of AI with the growth of mobile internet to revolutionize the way people consume and receive information.” He claims that ByteDance is “one of the first companies to launch mobile-first products powered by machine learning technology.”9 Both of his apps leverage AI to match

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. As with YY, monetization also comes from virtual gifts and a new avenue of mini-shops where merchandise can be bought directly from the app. ByteDance has become a star in the social media world and could be the next B after Baidu. It’s even been ripped off by Facebook

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and, yes, has been accused of spreading fake news and vulgar content. These challenges aside, ByteDance represents a breakthrough for Chinese internet services and their growing presence outside China. Its news app, Toutiao, touts 120 million daily readers. In China, where

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a boost internationally when its parent company bought and then merged in Musical.ly, a Chinese social video app with a large following outside China. ByteDance founder Zhang, 36, grew up in the southern province of Fujian and graduated as a software engineer from Nankai University in Tianjin. He’s used

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way to billionaire status, ranking twenty-fifth on the Forbes China Rich List.12 Fiercely independent, he’s reportedly turned down an acquisition offer for ByteDance from at least one of the internet giants. He has a bigger global vision than working for Tencent or Alibaba. And, in fact, his startup

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, and in April 2017 Sequoia put in $1 billion along with CCB International, an investment unit of China Construction Bank, at a $30 billion valuation. ByteDance jumped to the top of the unicorn list of most valuable startups (past Uber) in September 2018, when SoftBank and private equity firm KKR invested

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billion. The startup’s investors also include General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital, and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. See table 3-2. What could be next for ByteDance is going public. A comparable Chinese video streaming site themed in comics, animation, and games, Bilibili, already went public, on Nasdaq, in 2018. Table 3

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-2 At a Glance: ByteDance Founder: Chinese serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming Launched: 2012 Location: Beijing Main innovation: AI-powered apps TikTok for video and Toutiao for news Status: privately held

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fund-raising effort. Katzenberg has hired former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman to run Quibi. Nasty Mobile Streaming Fight In China, Tencent and ByteDance are duking it out for the market lead. The conflicts started in 2017 when Tencent invested $350 million at a valuation of $3 billion in

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rival, Chinese video streamer Kuaishou, started by CEO and former Google and Baidu programmer Su Hua.15 The next year, ByteDance and Tencent founders got into a spat on WeChat Moments news stream. Zhang accused Tencent of plagiarism after the titan revived and released a video

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clip feature and news reading function. Unfair competition and defamation claims shot back and forth between the two. In early 2019, ByteDance moved into Tencent turf by debuting video messaging app Duoshan, which lets users share videos that disappear within 72 hours. Baidu came out swinging too

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the race with short-video app Haokan and accused news feed WeChat Moments of blocking Baidu’s video content. World’s First AI News Anchor ByteDance is shaking things up in other ways, chiefly in traditional news gathering and distribution. Its Toutiao or “Today’s Headlines” app pushes news and commentaries

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machine learning during the 2016 Olympic Games. It’s no wonder that tech futurist Michael Spencer contends that the content discovery and creation playbook from ByteDance is what comes after Facebook.16 The result of these AI content engines, however, can be clickbait-y sensational content that gets the most clicks

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leave their town for their entire life.”17 Venture partner Connie Chan at Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco points out the AI-powered apps at ByteDance go to an extreme not common yet in the West. TikTok uses the app’s algorithms to decide which videos to show users, dictates your

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serve up personalized, high-quality content without any user inputs, social graphs, or product purchase history to rely on.19 From Sea to Shining Sea ByteDance has been moving up in recent years with content deals and smart acquisitions, fulfilling founder Zhang’s mission of making his startup borderless. That goal

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post got a lot closer when, in November 2017, ByteDance paid about $900 million to acquire Musical.ly, a social video app based in Shanghai with more than 200 million users worldwide. The deal combined

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track record with Musical.ly’s product innovation and grasp of users’ needs and tastes in the West. The result was a multicultural DNA. After ByteDance folded the four-year-old Musical.ly into TikTok and rebranded it to a single application under the TikTok name, the app immediately gained some

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30 million new users within three months. ByteDance also got inroads into Hollywood with Musical.ly and its deals with Viacom and NBCUniversal for short-form video shows

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Zhang emphasized that this deal makes a lot of sense because it integrates Musical.ly’s global reach with the massive user base of ByteDance in China and key Asian markets, and it creates a global digital media platform for content creators and brands both inside and out of China.

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Fishing for more, the aggressive ByteDance also has been busy buying into innovators and making deals from a Los Angeles–based office that is on the lookout for more. There were

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early 2019, ranging from business, strategy, and communications to engineering and product development. Over the past few years, ByteDance has snapped up Los Angeles–based Flipagram, a video and photo creation app set to music clips, and has invested $50 million in Live.me,

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a livestreaming app that is majority owned by Chinese mobile app developer Cheetah Mobile. Additionally, ByteDance acquired News Republic, a global mobile news aggregation service based in France, from Cheetah Mobile for $86.6 million

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. ByteDance even tried to buy a major stake in US social news aggregator Reddit from Si Newhouse’s Advance Publications but lost that deal to Tencent,

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impact with partnerships and moves into e-commerce. A deal was made with US internet media outlet BuzzFeed to share its entertainment content in China. ByteDance also reached a strategic deal with China’s e-commerce giant JD.com to let Toutiao users shop the e-commerce site. More than that

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-commerce. Toutiao recently launched an e-commerce app, Zhidian, to sell consumer and household goods. King of Titillating Content Like many digital media companies worldwide, ByteDance faces challenges dealing with fake news and offensive content. Chinese regulators have targeted vulgar content and “useless information”—crude comedy, scandals, and celebrity gossip, for

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Zhang the title of the “King of Titillating Content,” as reported by the South China Morning Post. Taking a proactive stance, Zhang has pledged that ByteDance will increase its team of censors, create a backlist of banned users, and improve its technology to screen content. The company has recently hired 2

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on its popular Douyin video app to comply with government pressure to clean up China’s internet. More fixes are coming: an AI lab that ByteDance formed in 2016 is working on state-of-the-art innovations in artificial intelligence. The lab is headed by Wei-Ying Ma, previously Microsoft Research

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’s assistant managing director. His marching orders are to develop machine-learning algorithms to weed out offensive content and to pinpoint more personalized content recommendations. ByteDance shows no signs of slowing down. It’s building an empire of apps for a new generation. In doing so

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, ByteDance is challenging China’s traditional BAT leaders and showing up internet leaders of the West. MEITUAN DIANPING: The M of TMD Chinese entrepreneur Wang Xing

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venture-backed privately held companies in the global unicorn club of startups valued at more than $1 billion.12 •Chinese AI-powered digital content app ByteDance ranked number one as the world’s most valuable unicorn at $75 billion and bypassed Uber at $68 billion. On-demand Chinese ride service Didi

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, Qiming Venture, IDG, Temasek, DST Global Meituan Dianping: Qiming Venture, Sequoia Capital China, General Atlantic Pinduoduo: Lightspeed China, IDG Capital, Banyan Partners, Sequoia Capital China ByteDance: SIG Asia, GGV Capital, Qiming Venture, New Enterprise Associates, Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital Kuaishou: DCM Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, Morningside Venture Capital SenseTime: Tiger Global

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transactions, such as the IPOs of NEA-backed Chinese semiconductor companies SMIC and Spreadtrum. In 2018, NEA came out swinging with a co-investment in ByteDance, one of China’s hottest startups, and an outlay for a promising Chinese startup in online education, Zuoyebang, with Sequoia Capital China and GGV Capital

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in his portfolio, including several in this book: smartphone maker Xiaomi, e-commerce site Xiaohongshu, and music entertainment streamer Musical.y, which was sold to ByteDance for around $900 million in 2017. Tung doesn’t mind sharing that an early bet on Xiaomi earned 866 times the initial investment, based on

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Rong360 and peer-to-peer lender PPDAI, in addition to a $300 million acquisition of a portfolio company, selfie editing and sharing app FaceU by ByteDance. “China’s enterprise service and deep tech innovation is in the early innings of development. Given China’s vast market, deep talent pool, and increasing

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Prices,” Bloomberg News, May 3, 2018; bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-03/in-ipo-letter-xiaomi-ceo-explains-innovation-at-honest-prices. 9. ByteDance overview, home page, bytedance.com/#about0. 10. Qian Chen, “The Biggest Trend in Chinese Social Media Is Dying,” CNBC, September 18, 2018; cnbc.com/2018/09/19

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/2018/09/19/short-video-apps-like-douyin-tiktok-are-dominating-chinese-screens.html. 16. Michael K. Spencer, “Who Is Yiming Zhang? The Founder of ByteDance Is Virtually Unknown Outside of China,” Medium, August 23, 2018; medium.com/futuresin/who-is-yiming-zhang-595a52c8ffb1. 17. Josh Horwitz, “China’s Next Generation

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Giants Are Getting Big by Serving the Country’s Poor,” Quartz, July 19, 2018; qz.com/1331677/tech-startups-bytedance-kuaishou-getting-big-serving-chinas-poor/. 18. Connie Chan, “When AI Is the Product: The Rise of AI-Based Consumer Apps,” Andreessen Horowitz, December 3

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Blecharczyk, Nathan, 115 Bob Xu, 135 Booking.com, 90 Bo Shao, 138 Breadtrip, 116 Breyer, Jim, 128, 138 Brin, Sergey, 34–35 Buffett, Warren, 208 ByteDance, 31–32, 43, 81–89, 130, 143, 153 C CalPERS (California Public Employees’ Retirement System), 134 CalSTRS (California State Teachers Retirement System), 134 Caltech university

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gaming business, 40, 64, 66 growth of, 39–40 social networking service, 41–42 strategic investments, 63–66 in US, 52, 63–65 war with ByteDance, 85 youth culture, 39 Tencent Music Entertainment, 41 Tencent Video, 41, 84 Terminator: Dark Fate, 53 Tesla, 2, 15, 64, 196, 209–210, 220 Thiel

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford · 25 Sep 2023 · 898pp · 236,779 words

abroad have also had to navigate the difficult terrain of regulators’ conflicting demands. In 2020, TikTok, a social media company owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was attempting to comply with the US government’s requirement that the company must find a US buyer—under the threat of being banned from

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twenty largest public internet companies—Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and JD among the top ten as of August 2022.9 When private internet companies are included, ByteDance also joins the top ten based on June 2022 data.10 In some domains of technology, including electronic payments, China has leapfrogged the US, leading

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government direction and active monitoring. In a 2021 interview given under the pseudonym “Li An,” an employee at ByteDance—the creator of TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin—shed light on how ByteDance’s censorship machine works and how connected it is to the CAC.126 Li An, who helped develop content

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company, recounted how the CAC would issue recurrent directives—at times over a hundred a day—to ByteDance’s Content Quality Center, which then ensured that these instructions were followed. The biggest fear for ByteDance was that it fails to delete politically sensitive content that triggers government scrutiny, which can be a

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An described her role in erasing the nation’s “collective memories” of historical events, removing unwanted conversations, and amplifying narratives that the Chinese government approves. ByteDance’s close compliance with government demands is not surprising given that the Chinese government actively monitors compliance and enforces its regulations.128 In July 2021

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, it was revealed that the government had blocked new app registrations for the ByteDance-owned Jinri Toutiao, one of China’s biggest mobile news sites, since September 2020. While no reason was given for this halt on registrations, the

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meet with the regulators regarding the app’s “vulgar content.”129 The State Administration of Radio and Television regulators also ordered Neihan Duanzi, another popular ByteDance app specializing in jokes and comedy sketches, to be shut down in 2018.130 If the tech companies submit to the government’s demands, what

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funding rounds151—even though the US bank exited from Alibaba prematurely, forgoing tremendous financial gains that ensued for other investors.152 As of October 2020, ByteDance’s largest outside investor was reportedly a US high-speed trading firm, Susquehanna, which had invested in the company in 2012.153 Qualcomm Ventures counts

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over $2 billion worth of his company’s shares to his philanthropic foundation.202 In May 2021, Zhang Yiming announced he would step down as ByteDance’s CEO and made a $77 million donation toward education in his native Fujian Province in June.203 In August 2021, Tencent doubled the amount

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Google in 2021 as the world’s most popular web domain.103 TikTok straddles the geopolitical divide: it is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which offers essentially the same short video app in China, known there as Douyin.104 The Chinese fast fashion e-commerce company Shein is another

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this influence will ultimately be wielded not just by TikTok but by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As a Chinese corporation, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance must obey Chinese law, including the Chinese government’s potential requests for the data that the company accumulates. For example, Republican Senator Josh Hawley has

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a concern both in terms of the information it collects and the information it disseminates—with either activity potentially serving the interests of Beijing.115 ByteDance has sought to alleviate these concerns by separating its Chinese and US businesses. The company operates TikTok in the US and a separate (yet near

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allowed the CCP to access Americans’ personal information, including those of overseas Chinese citizens.120 President Trump then followed with a separate executive order giving ByteDance ninety days to divest its American assets and destroy any data that TikTok had gathered in the United States.121 After a frantic search for

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US government actions short of a complete ban can still be legal.140 For example, the government could still use the CFIUS process to require ByteDance to divest its stake in TikTok.141 And despite TikTok’s court victories, Republicans in Congress continue to pressure the company on data privacy concerns

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company stock listed on US stock exchanges at stake.195 This is an unsettling prospect for many entities on both sides. Chinese companies like DiDi, ByteDance, and Ant Group could lose access to US capital markets.196 Some smaller Chinese tech companies can also be adversely affected. For example, audiobook and

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that provide other kinds of digital infrastructure: cloud services, e-commerce platforms, and more recently, social media platforms as companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance globalize their operations. Thus, the term “infrastructure power,” as used in this chapter, broadly describes Chinese companies’ growing global role in building not only physical

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might, for instance, gain access to the data that flows through Huawei-built 5G infrastructures, or influence foreign societies by spreading Chinese propaganda through the ByteDance-owned TikTok app that is rapidly gaining popularity abroad.9 Consequently, the Chinese infrastructure power not only entrenches Chinese tech companies’ global influence but possibly

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(EN). 125.Id. arts. 9, 12. 126.Shen Lu, I Helped Build ByteDance’s Vast Censorship Machine, protocol (Feb. 18, 2021), https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine. 127.Id. 128.See Segal, supra note 59. 129.ByteDance’s Toutiao Ordered by China to Halt New Registrations Since Sept—Sources

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, Reuters (July 16, 2021), https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedances-toutiao-ordered-by-china-halt-new-registrations-since-sept-sources-2021-07-16/; Nicole Jao, China Is Serious About Cleaning Up Jinri Toutiao and Kuaishou

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GIFs, Buzzy News and Jokes. China Isn’t Amused., N.Y. Times (Apr. 11, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/china-toutiao-bytedance-censor.html. 131.Lai Lin Thomala, Average Online Time of Internet Users in China Per Week from 2011 to 2021, Statista (Mar. 14, 2022), https

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Make TikTok a Global Hit Is Latest Chinese Tech Entrepreneur to Quit, CNN (May 20, 2021), https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/20/tech/zhang-bytedance-ceo-resignation-intl-hnk/index.html. 201.Zhong, supra note 166. 202.Xie Yu, Founder of China’s Meituan Donates $2.3 Billion Stake, Wall

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/articles/founder-of-chinas-meituan-donates-2-3-billion-stake-11622804438. 203.Yingzhi Yang & Bhargav Acharya, ByteDance Founder Zhang Yiming Steps Down as Chairman—Source, Reuters (Nov. 3, 2021), https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/bytedance-founder-zhang-step-down-chairman-bloomberg-news-2021-11-03/; Zhong, supra note 166. 204.Yue

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Respect to the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain, 85 Fed. Reg. 48637 (Aug. 11, 2020); Regarding the Acquisition of Musical.ly by ByteDance Ltd., 85 Fed. Reg. 51297 (Aug. 19, 2020). 232.Angela Huyue Zhang, Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism 240 (2021). 233.Id. 234.Tim Wu, A TikTok Ban

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User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed from China, Buzzfeed News (June 17, 2022), https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access. 117.Id. 118.Schuman, supra note 110. 119.Fadel Allassan, Trump Says TikTok Will Be Banned If Not Sold by Sept. 15, Demands Cut

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.Exec. Order No. 13942, 85 Fed. Reg. 48,637 (Aug. 6, 2020). 121.Order of Aug. 14, 2020 Regarding the Acquisition of Musical.ly by ByteDance Ltd., 85 Fed. Reg. 51,297 (Aug. 19, 2020). 122.David E. Sanger, David McCabe, & Erin Griffith, Oracle Chosen as TikTok’s Tech Partner, as

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Microsoft’s Bid Is Rejected, N.Y. Times (Sep. 13, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-microsoft-oracle-bytedance.html. 123.Paul Mozur, Raymond Zhong, & David McCabe, TikTok Deal Is Complicated by New Rules From China Over Tech Exports, N.Y. Times (Aug. 29

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–59 in news industry regulation, 351–52 Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative (G7), 321–22 Bulgaria, 144 Burma, 270–71, 274–75, 285–86 ByteDance, 14–15, 98–99, 165, 166–67, 175 Content Quality Center, 89 global influence, 70–71, 293–94 US funding, 93 CAC (Cyberspace Administration of

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley

by Atsuo Inoue · 18 Nov 2021 · 295pp · 89,441 words

have to do is focus on their core business. WeWork continues to evolve, with 70 per cent of the world’s largest companies – such as ByteDance, Google, Facebook and Goldman Sachs – having accessed its services. In any sector or business, being at the right place at the right time – random acts

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respect more widely recognised. In 2018, Son introduced Claure to a 35-year-old Chinese entrepreneur by the name of Zhang Yiming, the CEO of ByteDance, although Claure could not really grasp what Son meant when he described Zhang as the head of a ‘new media company

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’. ByteDance operated TikTok, a service where hundreds of thousands of people could record and upload video content, with the algorithm showing users those it thinks they

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quite well. Son told Claure that TikTok was the future of media and e-commerce, to which his counterpart chuckled, ‘Masa, you are always dreaming.’ ‘Bytedance and TikTok, in my opinion, will be one of the world’s most valuable companies’ Marcelo recalls. ‘But again, that is Masa’s incredible ability

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decision. ‘I think it is very unfortunate that the geopolitical wars between the China and the US can somehow potentially damage an incredible company like ByteDance. But, there will always be a solution because the technology, the company and the connectivity with people is so powerful that these are just obstacles

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that get in the middle. I have no doubt that ByteDance will be an incredibly powerful company, because it has the ability to deliver the news and the content that you want. ‘Compare this model to

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average viewing times are 90 minutes per day. Looking at these figures from an advertising revenue standpoint TikTok is vastly superior, underscoring the capacity of ByteDance’s algorithm to provide users with the content each and every one of them wants to see.’ Claure was in New York during the early

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it, so I did, but now I don’t bother with it any more.’ He would also talk about the optimistic outlook he has for ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), as the SoftBank Vision Fund is a major investor. Furthermore, he spoke about the extensive monetisation operation under way, stating the

Four Battlegrounds

by Paul Scharre · 18 Jan 2023

AI start-up ecosystem. China boasts some of the most highly valued AI start-ups in the world, including SenseTime at over $16 billion and ByteDance at $350 billion. In some areas, such as facial recognition, Chinese companies such as SenseTime and Megvii are global leaders and have a major leg

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WeChat’s 1.2 billion. The diversity of data also matters a great deal for training robust machine learning systems, and, with the exception of ByteDance’s TikTok, Chinese apps have struggled to gain a foothold outside of China. Tencent, which owns WeChat and other Chinese social media apps, will be

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by a handful of companies. Meta (which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram), Google (which owns YouTube), Tencent (which owns WeChat, QQ, and Qzone), and ByteDance (which owns TikTok and Douyin) dominate the marketplace. In the United States, over half of adults get their news from Facebook. The choices these companies

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. While TikTok’s content consists mostly of short, cute videos, its ownership presented a novel geopolitical challenge to the free world. TikTok was owned by ByteDance, a major Chinese tech firm, and was the first Chinese-owned social media platform to go global. U.S. social media platforms such as Facebook

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, Indonesia, Russia, Japan, and Europe, and by mid-2020 had nearly 700 million users globally, almost 100 million of whom were in the United States. (ByteDance operates a separate version of the app in China, called Douyin, which has 600 million users.) TikTok’s soaring popularity coincided with a more hawkish

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government issued additional bans over the next several months, prohibiting 267 Chinese apps in total. In August 2020, the Trump administration signed executive orders forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States. TikTok sued the U.S. government to halt the ban, launching a series of

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reaction against anything Chinese. The Trump administration’s fumbling messaging, combined with President Trump’s personal support for a proposed deal that would have allowed ByteDance to keep 80 percent ownership of TikTok, further clouded the administration’s intentions. Yet the national security risks of TikTok were real. Many worried about

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Hong Kong protestors. Independent researchers also found a glut of pro-CCP propaganda videos about Xinjiang. In 2019, The Guardian newspaper revealed leaked documents from ByteDance outlining TikTok’s moderation guidelines, which included censorship of political content. The bans were wide-ranging and included prohibiting videos of “highly controversial topics, such

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outright. In other cases, videos would remain visible only to the user who uploaded it but restricted from other users’ feeds. In a company statement ByteDance said, “The old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use.” If the algorithms on U.S. platforms like YouTube and Facebook pose

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risks of distorting online information, these risks are far more severe for TikTok. TikTok’s algorithm plays a more dominant role in curating content, ByteDance has been far less transparent than U.S. companies about their content moderation rules, and the company is subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s

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Party’s direction, through both legal and extralegal means. If the CCP demands that they hand over data or censor content, ByteDance, like any other Chinese company, must comply. ByteDance can contest U.S. government demands in an independent judiciary in the United States—as well as in the court of public

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opinion—but they have no such recourse in China. In 2018, after pressure from government regulators, Zhang Yiming, then-CEO of ByteDance, issued a public apology letter in which he affirmed his fealty to Xi Jinping thought and stated that “technology must be led by the socialist

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Kong IPO,” Reuters, December 30, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/sensetime-shares-open-up-16-hong-kong-debut-2021-12-30/. 5ByteDance: Emma Lee, “ByteDance Becomes World’s Largest Unicorn with $353 Billion Valuation: Hurun Report,” technode, December 20, 2021, https://technode.com/2021/12/20

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/bytedance-becomes-worlds-largest-unicorn-with-353-billion-valuation-hurun-report/; Roger Chen and Rui Ma, “How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup,” February 24, 2022, https://hbr.org/2022/02/how

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-bytedance-became-the-worlds-most-valuable-startup. 5SenseTime and Megvii: “Top 19 Facial Recognition Startups,” AI Startups (website), updated September

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, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/24/tiktok-reveals-us-global-user-growth-numbers-for-first-time.html. 147Douyin: Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh, “ByteDance’s Chinese Version of TikTok Hits 600 Million Daily Users,” Reuters, September 15, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china

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-bytedance/bytedances-chinese-version-of-tiktok-hits-600-million-daily-users-idUSKBN2660P4. 147national security risks of a Chinese-owned social media app: Tom Cotton, Senator for Arkansas, “

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.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/tiktok-wechat-baidu-and-uc-browser-among-59-chinese-apps-permanently-banned-in-india/articleshow/80454258.cms. 147executive orders forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok: Exec. Order No. 13942, 85 Fed. Reg. 48637 (August 11, 2020), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/11/2020-17699/addressing

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. 2020-18360, 85 Fed. Reg. 51297, August 19, 2020, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/19/2020-18360/regarding-the-acquisition-of-musically-by-bytedance-ltd. 147TikTok sued the U.S. government: Tiktok vs. Trump (complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief, D.D.C., 2020), http://docs.dpaq.de/16820

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of Muslims: Brenda Goh, “TikTok Apologizes for Temporary Removal of Video on Muslims in China,” Reuters, November 27, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-tiktok-xinjiang/tiktok-apologizes-for-temporary-removal-of-video-on-muslims-in-china-idUSKBN1Y209E. 148“incorrectly partially restricted”: Yaqiu Wang, “Targeting TikTok’s Privacy Alone

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, 48, 50 Bugs Bunny (fictional character), 231 Bureau of Industry and Security, 166 Burundi, 110 Buscemi, Steve, 130 Bush, George W., and administration, 68–70 ByteDance, 143 C3 AI, 196, 224 C4ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Cloud, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), 107 CalFire, 201–2 California Air National Guard, 201, 203 Caltech

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari · 9 Sep 2024 · 566pp · 169,013 words

with numerous companies that might have no physical presence in Uruguay but that provide her with various services. Google provides her with free search, and ByteDance—the parent company of the TikTok application—provides her with free social media. Other foreign companies routinely target her with advertisements: Nike wants to sell

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wants to sell her soft drinks. In order to target her, these companies buy both personal information and ad space from Google and ByteDance. In addition, Google and ByteDance use the information they harvest from her and from millions of other users to develop powerful new AI tools that they can then

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sell to various governments and corporations throughout the world. Thanks to such transactions, Google and ByteDance are among the richest corporations in the world. So, should her transactions with them be taxed in Uruguay? Some think they should. Not just because

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movie theaters lose customers and ad revenue to the tech giants. Prospective Uruguayan AI companies also suffer, because they cannot compete with Google’s and ByteDance’s massive data troves. But the tech giants reply that none of the relevant transactions involved any physical presence in Uruguay or any monetary payments

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. Google and ByteDance provided Uruguayan citizens with free online services, and in return the citizens freely handed over their purchase histories, vacation photos, funny cat videos, and other

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a physical presence should be adjusted to include the notion of a digital presence in a country.”49 This implies that even if Google and ByteDance have no physical presence in Uruguay, the fact that people in Uruguay use their online services should nevertheless make them subject to taxation there. Just

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what, exactly, the Uruguayan government should tax. For example, suppose Uruguayan citizens shared a million cat videos through TikTok. ByteDance didn’t charge them or pay them anything for this. But ByteDance later used the videos to train an image-recognition AI, which it sold to the South African government for ten

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Ties to China: Why Concerns over Your Data Are Here to Stay,” Guardian, Nov. 7, 2022, www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/07/tiktoks-china-bytedance-data-concerns; James Clayton, “TikTok: Chinese App May Be Banned in US, Says Pompeo,” BBC, July 7, 2020, www.bbc.com/news/technology-53319955. 17

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words

for atypical electricity use, a potential sign of an unregistered inhabitant. Social media behavior is tracked; so is staying off of social media. Companies like ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, have allegedly helped Chinese authorities track down Uyghur women of childbearing age and forcibly sterilize them.57 At supposed health checks

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the world,94 and counts nearly 100 million American users—many of them teens. Like Grindr, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, Beijing-based ByteDance. TikTok’s users delight in silly clips of themselves dancing and cooking. But its capabilities extend beyond frivolous footage. Each of the millions of videos

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up.98 In June 2021, a group of former TikTok employees reportedly said “the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance were so blurry as to be almost nonexistent.”99 Alarmingly, one employee claimed that ByteDance employees “are able to access U.S. user data.”100 On top of the data TikTok collects is

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regulate international commerce in the event of an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States”—to block any transactions with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance (or with WeChat).114 In response, TikTok promptly sued the Trump administration.115 TikTok’s CEO stepped down after just four months on the job

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on TikTok,” delighted headline writers proclaimed.116 The following month, President Trump announced that he had approved a deal allowing Oracle and Walmart to acquire ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok. Questions remained, however, over the fluid and confusing terms of the deal.117 “This unique technology eliminates the risk of foreign

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of much media attention during the debate over whether to ban or compel the divestment of TikTok, the video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance. There are those who argue that such restrictions would be tantamount to replicating Chinese behavior, in essence creating a Great Firewall of our own. In

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/chinas-communist-party-ran-campaign-to-discredit-bbc-thinktank-finds. 3 Ibid. 4 Shen Lu, “I helped build ByteDance’s censorship machine,” Protocol, February 18, 2021, https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine?utm_campaign=post-teaser&utm_content=8gi0rq1u. 5 Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back (New York

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social media company is tightly controlled by Chinese parent,” CNBC, June 25, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/tiktok-insiders-say-chinese-parent-bytedance-in-control.html. 100 Ibid. 101 Georgia Wells, Shan Li, and Liza Lin, “TikTok, Once an Oasis of Inoffensive Fun, Ventures Warily Into Politics,” Wall

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security, US lawmakers say,” CNN, October 25, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/25/tech/tiktok-national-security/index.html. 108 Chen Du, “Exclusive: ByteDance Cuts Domestic Engineers’ Data Access to TikTok, Other Overseas Products,” PingWest, June 7, 2020, https://en.pingwest.com/a/6875. 109 Paul Mozur, “TikTok to

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Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 202 Buchanan, Ben, 48 Burr, Aaron, 264 Burr, Richard, 174, 219 Bush, George W., 141, 200 Bush, Vannevar, 164–65 Buttigieg, Pete, 202 ByteDance, 147, 185–86, 188, 225 Cambridge Analytica, 67–68, 70, 143, 146, 251, 258 Campbell, Kurt, 236–37 Carson, Rachel, xx Censored (Roberts), 78 Center

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic · 15 Jul 2025 · 278pp · 71,701 words

its censorship policies such that social media companies would be held accountable for short-form video content generated by their users. One of those companies, ByteDance, had a popular app called Douyin that was subject to these regulations; to adhere to these new censorship policies, it began aggressively blocking any content

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new markets, although we can’t know for sure, because everything about them is shrouded in corporate secrecy. There is substantial reason to believe that ByteDance has suppressed anti-Beijing sentiment on TikTok,[3] and that it has previously censored content related to LGBTQ+ themes and other sensitive topics such as

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-syncing, and primarily filmed vertically (a response to the rise of smartphones). By 2017, it had reached 200 million users and caught the attention of ByteDance, which wanted to replicate the success of its own Chinese video app, Douyin. Musical.ly was acquired and merged into TikTok, which is where

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ByteDance perfected the recipe by engineering the most addictive social media website imaginable. As soon as you opened the app, a rectangle of video would command

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break free from its short Vine-like style as the algorithm began pushing videos over a minute in length. This was a deliberate decision by ByteDance to begin chipping away at YouTube’s monopoly on long-form video, and if I hadn’t responded by switching to longer-form videos, my

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equivalent will find customers regardless of geographic constraint. In Anderson’s prescient words, “The future of business is selling less of more.” Now that Meta, ByteDance, and Alphabet have engineered these niche communities on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, they alone hold an advantage in controlling corporate marketing to their all-new

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, 17, 19 budget airline, 72 bulletin boards, 14–15, 35 bullying, 4 Bunyan, Paul, 197 bussin, 146, 211 butt, substitutions for, 44, 153 BuzzFeed, 67 ByteDance, 6, 40, 70, 172 C cadence, 88, 95 campcore, 165 Canada, 211 canceling, 55–56 canon events, 202 canthal tilt, 132, 138 cap, 146, 160

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

by Edward Fishman · 25 Feb 2025 · 884pp · 221,861 words

Chinese video-sharing app had surged in record time to become the most popular social media platform among American teenagers. While TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was privately held and counted well-known American investors among its largest shareholders, U.S. officials worried that the company had no choice but to

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McDonald and Zen Soo, “Why Does US See Chinese-owned TikTok as a Security Threat?” The Associated Press, March 24, 2023, apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-shou-zi-chew-8d8a6a9694357040d484670b7f4833be; John D. McKinnon and Stu Woo, “The Billionaire Keeping TikTok on Phones in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, September

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20, 2023, www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedance-ban-congress-15a41ec4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT hand over intimate data: Kelvin Chan and Haleluya Hadero, “Why TikTok’s Security Risks Keep Raising

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, “Trump Officially Orders TikTok’s Chinese Owner to Divest,” The New York Times, August 14, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/business/tiktok-trump-bytedance-order.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT sale of the app to Oracle: Erin Griffith and David McCabe, “ ‘There’s No There There’: What

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, 61, 63, 67–69, 79, 130–31 Iraq War and, 17, 42, 58, 130, 146, 147 Kerry’s debate with, 58, 59 Putin and, 146 ByteDance, 299–300 C CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act), 248 Cafe Milano plot, 93, 94 CalPERS, 186 Cameron, David, 189 Carnegie Endowment for

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber · 3 Oct 2024 · 424pp · 123,730 words

was a horrific experience.’2 Not all the deals were bad. Between 2017 and 2020, the Vision Fund had stakes in ARM, Coupang, Didi, DoorDash, ByteDance, the Chinese internet giant and founder of TikTok, as well as Guardant Health and Roivant Sciences. Both exits from Coupang and Didi produced excellent returns

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China for more than a quarter century. The SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio had invested hundreds of millions in China’s leading tech companies such as ByteDance, owner of TikTok, and Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing app. Masa felt he had every right to feel secure, but he failed to understand that

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, just as Masa expects AI will in the none-too-distant future. Today SoftBank’s portfolio includes China’s ride-hailing Didi and internet giant ByteDance; food-delivery services like DoorDash and Grab; as well as automated robotic warehouses like Symbotic. These were the ‘first wave’ of AI-related companies with

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Chambers, John, 162 Chambers, Stuart, 245–7, 249–50, 252 ChatGPT, 327, 328 Cheng Wei, 273 China: (B2C) consumer market in, 169–71, 174–7; ByteDance, 284, 321, 328; China Mobile, 225, 235; Communist party, 5–6, 144, 175, 314, 321–2; confrontation with Trump, 320; Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, 144