They’re playing out the clock on TikTok.

President Donald Trump put pen to paper Thursday on an executive order that outlined a path for control of the social media app to be transferred from its parent, ByteDance, to a consortium including US tech giant Oracle, Silicon Valley private equity shop Silver Lake, and Emirati AI investor MGX.

But the agreement still requires signoff from the involved parties, notably on the Chinese side. When all is said and done (or if all is said and done), Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX are expected to control about 50% of the company. ByteDance and some of its existing investors are expected to control roughly 30%. Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the new US TikTok could be worth $14 billion.

Pretty Easy TikTok Challenge

Whatever the valuation, the value of getting a deal done would be priceless — if only to put an end to more than a year of speculation about the wildly popular app’s future. That began when Congress passed a bipartisan law in April 2024 to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a US-based owner, and, finally, there soon may be breathing room to focus on the zillion other things going on in 2025. Including the more interesting post-deal future of TikTok:

• There’s no clear picture yet of what strategy the new owners expect for the US spinoff. ByteDance has seen major growth by pushing into e-commerce with TikTok Shop, but that could always give way to its traditional ad focus — the only problem there being whether ad buyers will be able to run global campaigns if TikTok is segmented between the US and the rest of the world.
• The US TikTok will license the app’s addictive algorithm from ByteDance, the White House has said, and store data on US users to populate the algorithm stateside. The White House also said Oracle will “retrain” and “continuously monitor” the US TikTok algorithm to prevent “improper manipulation or surveillance,” giving it tremendous power over the consumption habits of its more than 170 million American users.

Beyond Dance Crazes: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close Trump ally, and his co-partners are getting more than just a place for memes, trends and shopping: A Pew poll published this week found that one in five US adults regularly get news from TikTok, a massive increase from just 3% in 2020.

There’s new competition on the tarmac, with five-year-old startup Breeze Airways getting permission to fly international routes. Breeze, which was started by JetBlue’s founder, said it’s the first sizable airline since Virgin America to get the global go-ahead.

Breeze is adding seven routes to start, which will connect tourist hotspots like Cancun and Punta Cana with smaller US hubs, including Charleston, South Carolina, and Providence, Rhode Island.

As budget airlines including Spirit and Frontier struggle, carriers like Breeze are trying to cater to a customer who doesn’t need a hot towel and unlimited cocktails but still wants a step above un-reclinable seats and paying extra for water.

Basic Economy Super Plus Ultra

People struggling with their budgets aren’t trading down for travel, Bloomberg reports — they’re just not flying anymore. Higher-income fliers, meanwhile, are opting for cheaper seats with fewer frills, but not a totally bare-bones experience.

Breeze and its rivals are after this flier:

• Breeze offers four tiers of tickets and said that a double-digit percentage of passengers upgrade their experience (roomier seats, bigger baggage allowances) on their second time in the skies. The five-year-old airline notched its first quarterly operating profit last year. Fun fact: Founder David Neeleman said his daughter-in-law’s social account, Ballerina Farm, used to be more profitable than Breeze.
• Budget carriers that have struggled with empty seats in recent years are using a similar playbook to Breeze’s to regain altitude. Spirit, which filed for its second bankruptcy last month and has lost money every year since 2019, has added perks like two free checked bags for credit card holders and assigned seat upgrades. Frontier, whose revenue fell nearly 5% last quarter, plans to introduce first-class-style seats this year.

Unfriendly Skies: There’s more competition than ever to cater to slightly spendier customers, with not just budget carriers but also major airlines offering a wider selection of seating options and upgrades. And last year, Delta and United commanded three-quarters of the airline industry’s US profits. Another significant aspect of Breeze’s strategy is targeting underserved locations and connecting those cities with major tourism destinations. Breeze’s founder said 86% of its routes have no competition, while 90% of Spirit’s routes overlap with those of other airlines.

Technology acceleration happens fast: One day, your work phone is a Blackberry. The next day, it’s an iPhone. And the next, there’s a quantum computer — looking like a golden robot jellyfish from the future — seated next to you running the trading desk.

We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer. British bank HSBC said Thursday that it ran a test with computing giant IBM to see how one of the state-of-the-art computers would perform as a bond trader. The initial result showed a quantum leap in returns.

A Working Theory

HSBC said the study pitted a set of quantum computing tools developed by IBM for algorithmic trading of European corporate bonds against traditional industry methods. Ultimately, the quantum stack, which combines IBM’s Heron quantum processor with conventional computing, proved 34% better at predicting the likelihood of a trade being filled.

HSBC hailed the exercise as a “ground-breaking world-first” in bond trading. “This is something that we do thousands of times a day already, and that’s estimating the likelihood of winning a trade,” said Josh Freeland, HSBC’s global head of algo credit trading. “At one point, there were 16 physicists and AI machine-learning researchers working around the clock trying to achieve the same thing that the quantum computer did.” For the time being, however, the achievement remains a strictly academic one:

• The data used in the test came from over a million quote requests on more than 5,000 bonds traded between September 2023 and October 2024, according to the study. It warns that conclusions lack “generalization guarantees to other market environments or trading datasets,” making them potentially unreliable.
• Nevertheless, as Philip Intallura, HSBC’s group head of quantum technologies, noted, the promise of the test is significant: “It means we now have tangible example of how today’s quantum computers could solve a real-world business problem at scale and offer a competitive edge, which will only continue to grow as quantum computers advance.”

Race to the Starting Line: Intallura emphasized that HSBC is “relentlessly focused” on “near-term” applications for quantum computers, which use units of information called qubits to perform complicated calculations at speeds well beyond the capabilities of traditional computers. IBM, too, will want to see its technology deployed sooner rather than later: It’s racing to beat Google to scale quantum technology, which some experts predict could drive unheard-of scientific and medical breakthroughs in the next few decades.