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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday declaring that his plan to sell Chinese-owned TikTok’s U.S. operations to U.S. and global investors will address the national security requirements in a 2024 law. The new U.S. company will be valued at around $14 billion, Vice President JD Vance said, putting a price tag on the popular short video app far below some analyst estimates. Trump on Thursday delayed until January 20 enforcement of the law that bans the app unless its Chinese owners sell it amid efforts to extract TikTok’s U.S. assets from the global platform, line up American and other investors, and win approval from the Chinese government. The publication of the executive order shows Trump is making progress on the sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets, but numerous details need to be fleshed out, including how the U.S. entity would use TikTok’s most important asset, its recommendation algorithm. “There was some resistance on the Chinese side, but the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans’ data privacy as required by law,” Vance told reporters at an Oval Office briefing. Trump’s order says the algorithm will be retrained and monitored by the U.S. company’s security partners, and operation of the algorithm will be under the control of the new joint venture. Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping had indicated approval of the plans. “I spoke with President Xi,” Trump said. “We had a good talk, I told him what we were doing and he said go ahead with it.” China’s foreign ministry on Friday reiterated that the government “respects the will of enterprises and welcomes them to conduct business negotiations on the basis of market rules to reach solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and achieve a balance of interests.” “We hope the U.S. will provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies investing in the United States,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a press conference, without giving further details of the deal. TikTok did not immediately comment on Trump’s action. Trump has credited TikTok, which has 170 million U.S. users, with helping him win reelection last year. Trump has 15 million followers on his personal TikTok account. The White House also launched an official TikTok account last month. “This is going to be American-operated all the way,” Trump said. He said that Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies; Rupert Murdoch, the chairman emeritus of Fox News owner Fox Corp and newspaper publisher News Corp, and “probably four or five absolutely world-class investors” would be part of the deal. The White House did not discuss how it came up with the $14 billion valuation. TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, currently values itself at more than $330 billion, according to its new employee share buyback plan. TikTok contributes a small percentage of the company’s total revenue. According to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, TikTok was estimated to be worth $30 billion to $40 billion without the algorithm as of April 2025. Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said the executive order left unanswered questions, including whether ByteDance would still control the algorithm. “The problem is that the president has certified the deal, but he has not provided a lot of information on the algorithm,” he said. Chinese media on Friday also painted a different picture of the TikTok agreement, suggesting ByteDance would continue to play a major or operational role. ByteDance will set up a new U.S. company as part of the restructuring of TikTok’s U.S. operations, Chinese media outlet LatePost reported, citing sources. The new company to be set up by ByteDance will be responsible for e-commerce, branding operations and interconnection with international operations, the report said. The report also said the joint venture, as described by the White House and valued at $14 billion, would be responsible for U.S. digital security, safeguarding content and software as well as related local businesses. Another Chinese financial magazine, Caixin, also reported, citing people close to the deal, that ByteDance planned to set up a TikTok U.S. entity that will receive some revenue from the new TikTok joint venture. Both reports were taken down from their respective websites later on Friday. The White House and ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ORACLE AND OTHERS TO OWN TIKTOK IN THE U.S. A group of three investors, including Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake, will take a roughly 50% stake in TikTok U.S., two sources familiar with the deal said on Thursday. A group of existing shareholders in ByteDance will hold a roughly 30% stake, one of the sources said. Among ByteDances current investors are Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic and KKR. Given intense investor interest in TikTok, the 50% stake may still shift, the source noted. Oracle and Silver Lake did not immediately respond to requests for comment. CNBC reported earlier, citing sources, that Abu Dhabi-based MGX, Oracle and Silver Lake are poised to be the main investors in TikTok U.S. with a combined 45% ownership. MGX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the CNBC report. Republican House of Representatives lawmakers said they wanted to see more details of the deal to ensure it represented a clean break with China. “As the details are finalized, we must ensure this deal protects American users from the influence and surveillance of CCP-aligned groups, said U.S. Representatives Brett Guthrie, Gus Bilirakis and Richard Hudson. The agreement on TikToks U.S. operations includes the appointment by ByteDance of one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the other six seats, a senior White House official said on Saturday. ByteDance would hold less than 20% in TikTok U.S. to comply with requirements set out in the 2024 law that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if ByteDance did not sell its U.S. assets. Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom and Brenda Goh Jeff Mason, Dawn Chmielewski and David Shepardson, Reuters
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Fans of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant will be disappointed to learn that the beloved restaurant and pub chain has abruptly closed all of its locations across multiple states. Heres why and what you need to know about Iron Hill Brewerys closure. Whats happened? Yesterday (Thursday, September 25), Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant made several announcements. Effective immediately, it was closing the doors to all its locations, the company revealed. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant was founded nearly 30 years ago. Its first location opened in Newark, Delaware, in 1996. Since then, it had expanded to multiple states along the countrys eastern coast, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina. According to Nations Restaurant News, Iron Hill Brewery had 19 locations as of the end of 2024. That same year, the companys sales increased by 4% to $104.1 million. Yet the modest sales growth apparently wasnt enough to keep Iron Hill Brewery going. Last week, the company announced it was closing three of its locations, including its original Newark location. At the time, an Iron Hill Brewery spokesperson told NRN that the three closures were part of the companys ongoing efforts to adapt to a changing business landscape while focusing on strengthening its long-term growth and success. But just a week later, Iron Hill shocked customers and employees by announcing that its remaining 16 locations would be closing as well. Iron Hill Brewery notifies employees of bankruptcy via email On September 25, Iron Hill Brewery sent an email to employees notifying them that the business would be closing all locations for good. In the email, which was obtained by the website Breweries in PA and also shared on social media forums like Reddit, Iron Hills leadership said, It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the closure of all our restaurant locations effective immediately. The email went on to explain that it had made the difficult decision to file for bankruptcy. It cited ongoing financial challenges as the reason for its decision. The company went on to explain that it had been trying to secure new funding to keep the chain going, but presumably, that funding was not achieved. The same day of the email to employees, Iron Hill posted a brief notice on its website, letting customers know of the developments. USA Today reports that this same notice was posted to the doors of some of the shuttered Iron Hill restaurants. After many wonderful years serving our communities, all Iron Hill locations have closed, the notice read in part. It has been our pleasure to serve you, and we are deeply grateful for your support, friendship, and loyalty over the years. The notice ends by noting that the company sincerely hope[s] to return in the future. Full list of closed Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant locations With the three closures on September 18, and the additional 16 closures on September 25, Iron Hill Brewery has now closed all of its 19 locations. Here is the list of those locations: Delaware Newark Rehoboth Beach Wilmington Georgia Atlanta New Jersey Maple Shade Voorhees Pennsylvania Chestnut Hill Exton Hershey Huntingdon Valley Lancaster Lehigh Valley Media Newtown North Wales Philadelphia West Chester South Carolina Columbia Greenville A busy time for restaurant bankruptcies Unfortunately, Iron Hill Brewery isnt the only restaurant chain that has announced bankruptcy recently. Since 2024, several established chains have announced bankruptcy plans, including Buca di Beppo, Hooters, Red Lobster, Roti, BurgerFi, and Tijuana Flats. Many of these bankruptcies have resulted in store closures. While each company will have different factors influencing its decision to file for bankruptcy, many restaurant chains have been experiencing similar problems in recent years, which often contribute to their bankruptcy. These problems include higher costs, inflationary pressures that lead diners to cut back on their discretionary spending, and foot traffic that has yet to recover to its pre-pandemic norms.
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E-Commerce
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. Our new print issue features How YouTube Ate TV, an oral history of the video-sharing sites impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article. So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the companys earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week, bringing the story up to 2025and, in the case of AIs sweeping impact on the platform, beyond. One of the joys of working on this project with my colleagues and fellow interviewers, María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, and David Salazar, was having an excuse to think back to what the web was like 20 years ago. Its not just that YouTube was brand new and rapidly becoming a necessity of everyday life. At the time, the whole proposition of being able to easily watch videos on the internet at all was a novelty. The technology that made itand sites like YouTubepossible at all was Macromedias Flash. By the time YouTube came along, Flash was more than a decade old. Initially known as FutureWave SmartSketch, it morphed from a drawing app for pen-based computers into a browser plug-in that allowed websites to offer more motion and interactivity than the early web could muster on its own. Flash jazzed up the internet without requiring much in the way of bandwidth or computing cyclesa critical virtue back in the days of pokey dial-up connections. A whole universe of Flash-enabled animations and games sprung up. Flash was so manifestly useful that Netscape and Microsoft bundled it with their browsers. Eventually, the plug-in added support for video playback, dramatically simplifying a process that had formerly required clunky software such as RealPlayer. Instead of video being something you watched in a separate app with its own interface, it could be rendered right inside sites. Thats why YouTube was so easy to use. It also permitted the fledgling site to make its videos embeddable on any web page, spreading them all over the internet. If you were online back then, you may recall all this. But Im afraid Flashs reputation was tarnished by what happened well after it helped YouTube become, well, YouTube. A couple of months after YouTube was founded, Adobe agreed to acquire Macromedia. Once Flash came into its portfolio, the software giant aggressively stuffed the plug-in with new features. What had begun as a complement to the plain-vanilla web became a platform unto itself. As Flash got more powerful, it lost its original spritely nature. Increasingly, it was a bloated resource hogsomething you reluctantly allowed onto your computer because a sizable percentage of the web wouldnt work without it. In 2011, I wrote about how Flash had mucked up my MacBook Air, and how much better the laptop worked with the plug-in disabled. Did I mention that Flash also had some pretty significant security issues? By the time I banished Flash from my Mac, the PC-centric web that had given us Flash in the first place was receding into history. Apples introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 had put browsers onto new classes of gadgets with smaller displays and touchscreen interfaces. But Apple didnt give Adobe the kind of technical access it needed to put Flash on an iPhone or iPad. On those devices, Flash content showed up as empty boxes. In 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter, Thoughts on Flash, that argued that Adobes software was rife with problems and Apples platforms were better off without it. Adobeand a fair percentage of technology enthusiastssaw Apples exclusion of Flash as being about locking out competition, not enhancing the user experience. Now, Googles Android mobile operating system could run Flash. And for a time, makers of Android devices considered that a major advantage. BlackBerry, the maker of the PlayBook tablet, even ran TV commercials trumpeting Flash support as a defining feature. The only problem was that mobile Flash was awful. It taxed the devices of the period beyond their breaking point. Even if it had been more efficient, much of the worlds Flash content simply didnt work well on a tiny touchscreen. In 2011, Adobe gave up on mobile Flash. Then a suite of open web technologies known as HTML5 largely replicated Flashs features as part of web browsings basic functionality, no plug-in required. Many big sites started abandoning Flash, period. Adobe decided to wind down the technology in 2017 and stopped supporting it altogether in 2020. Todays internet is entirely Flash-free. I dont miss Flash in the sense of thinking we were better off when it was central to our computing lives or fantasizing about it coming back. Even in the days when Flash was quite pleasant, a single company bearing so much responsibility for how websites worked was never ideal. That became painfully clear when Adobe lost track of the values that had made Flash popular in the first place. When it finally died, I was able to reallocate the brain cells Id dedicated to wrestling with it to happier pursuits. Nevertheless, it was nice to remember the days when Flashs impact on the web was largely positive. As a startup, YouTube got a lot of things right, such as seeing its users as a community, not just a morass of eyeballs. But none of that would have mattered if the internet had still been stuck in the RealPlayer era. As Billy Biggs, a software engineer whos been at Google and YouTube since 2006, put it when I spoke with him for our YouTube history, Flash video is what made this all possible. It was the right technology at the right time. Thats as much a part of its legacy as its later regrettable evolution and descent into obsolescence. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company This interactive AI-generated podcast app from ex-Googlers blew my mindHuxe makes podcasts almost uncannily personaland even lets you talk to their AI hosts. Read More Inside Amazon’s ‘Iliad Flow,’ the deceptive UX at the center of its federal trialWe unpack the FTC’s claims that Amazon used design to trick customers into buyingand keepinga Prime subscription. Read More A Facebook dating app hopes to be the cure for ‘swipe fatigue’The AI-powered bot can even suggest pickup lines. Read More AI tools aren’t making much of a difference for companiesChat GPT, Copilot, and their competitors are boosting productivity without moving the needle on profit and loss. Read More 5 time-saving Outlook features you’re probably overlookingOnce you know these gems, you can’t go back to not using them. Read More I gave ChatGPT $500 of real money to invest in stocks. Its picks surprised meI told ChatGPT with GPT-5’s ‘Thinking’ model selected that I would give it $500 to invest however it saw fit. Read More
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