The Big Story I’m writing this Friday afternoon so please cut me some slack if the news cycle has moved beyond this, but TikTok! Holy moly, it seems that days after the house antitrust committee peppered Big Tech CEOs with questions around anti-competitive practices, the Trump administration is going to gift an American company the deal of a lifetime. Report: Microsoft in talks to buy TikTok’s US business from China’s ByteDance Chatter on Friday indicated that Microsoft was leading the talks to buy out the company (the US business that is) from ByteDance, which is surprising in ways, but I also suppose there was zero chance Facebook would even dream of making a bid given the antitrust environment, while Amazon and Apple probably know better than to drive into social networking. Google, I don’t know, I’d imagine those Google+ ambitions still exist, but perhaps they’ve been buried. Regardless, the idea that the rising social network falls into the hands of a company that wandered ass-backwards into the deal by being one of the few companies with the resources, but no existing presence in the consumer social media world, is wild. It also means massive ramifications for the future of social media. TikTok was one of the first truly existential threats that Facebook was facing down. While it obviously would’ve been better for them to have been dealt a TikTok shutdown, the app being sold off to Microsoft probably isn’t betting too far from that outcome. Satya has turned Microsoft into quite an impressive beast as of late, but consumer has just never been a comfortable spot for them under his reign. It’s probably unwise to bet that Microsoft will be able to avoid running a decent consumer product into the ground. Cough cough, Skype, cough cough, LinkedIn, cough cough, Mixer. We’ll hear soon enough how exactly this shakes out, but TikTok was in capable hands and it’s hard to imagine that the threat will be as real if it has to suddenly deal with a corporate reorganization and a hybridization under a new corporate entity that probably doesn’t know what it’s doing but can’t resist the chance at striking gold. Long live Facebook. | 
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