2025-10-01 00:30:00
There is not much to say that hasn't already been said. Both because people who actually review iPhones these days have already undoubtedly taken every angle, but also because after 18 years of the iPhone, even on an individual level, there's just not much left to write. If you like the iPhone in 2007, and 2008, and 2009, and 2010... spoiler alert: you're gonna like the iPhone in 2025.
I mean, there are a few new things to say this year I suppose because Apple went the 'Air' route with one of the models. But while I'm tempted by the more 'Pro' specs there, that just was never going to be the model for me. The two things I care about most in the iPhone are battery life and the camera system. So it was always going to be iPhone 17 Pro Max all the way.
Also, this one comes in orange. That's both sort of weird and sort of fun.1 Very fall.
While Matthew Panzarino used to level-set his iPhone thoughts by taking it to Disneyland, I took mine on a more rugged adventure this year: to the Scottish Highlands. Specifically, I was all the way up and out in the Isle of Skye with my newly acquired Apple devices – beyond the 17th (ish) iPhone, I also had a pair of threes in tow: the AirPods Pro 3 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3.
I'm happy to report that everything performed well in all conditions – including in 13th century castles and 50mph wind gusts. I will say that I was very happy to have the better battery life of all three devices on this trip. Though, as always, it's hard to know how much of the battery life feels boosted because of the new hardware versus it just being new hardware instead of my old hardware. In particular, I had (literally) worn my AirPods Pro 2 battery into the ground, it seems. Ditto with the Apple Watch Ultra 2, which was two years old after I skipped the "new" black version last year.
Overall, the AirPods Pro 3 feel like an awesome, no-brainer update. Everything about them is better, most notably the noise-cancellation. Again, some of that is undoubtedly because my AirPods Pro 2 were worn down, but this new model feels like Apple refined and perfected the form factor. While the old ones fit in my ears just fine, these do seem more secure. They also, oddly, seem to protrude more, which may just mean I should try other tips beyond the defaults – though my "seal" test was perfect. Maybe Apple is just preparing us (and our ears) to add some cameras to the mix? Unclear, but the sound remains very clear!
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is less of a home run. That's only because it really doesn't seem any different from the Ultra 2 (which itself didn't seem all that different from the first Ultra). I know the screen is said to be ever-so-slightly larger, but as someone who wore the Ultra 2 every day for two years and switched to the Ultra 3, you can't tell. It has the same chip, which is fine as it wasn't slow before. There is satellite connectivity now, which is nice and potentially handy when you're, say, up in the Scottish Highlands! (Though I never needed it.) I did opt for the black model this year, which is nice. And when paired with my orange iPhone makes me feel a bit like David Pumpkins.
As for that orange iPhone... I wasn't sure I would like the color as is far more orange than, say, brass or bronze, but it's nice. As is so often the case with Apple's colors, it shifts depending on the light. It can morph from papaya in the sunlight to almost copper when it's more dim. I'm not sure I would ever call it "Cosmic".
That glass back plate though stays an awfully muted, dull orange throughout. For some reason, I associate the color with sherbert. I don't hate the color contrast of this area, but it is fairly weird. It almost screams "put a MagSafe Wallet on me". Or a battery back, which, oddly, Apple only now makes for the iPhone Air.
Feel-wise, when case-less, I think I prefer the 17 (Pro Max) to the 16 (Pro Max). The aluminum feels "softer" and slightly more rounded than the sharper titanium. It doesn't feel less premium to me, but we'll see if and when it starts scratching...
It is, of course, also slightly thicker, which I honestly don't mind at all. In fact, I almost wish Apple would go more extreme and maybe make a super-chunk iPhone to accommodate an even larger battery! Could you imagine one so thick that there was no longer a camera bump – er sorry, "plateau"? I mean, that would undoubtedly be a bridge too far for Apple, but who says no to a two-day battery iPhone?
Speaking of the "plateau", I think it works well design-wise. When paired with a case, it almost doesn't even look like there's a camera bump anymore. And the whole thing just looks a lot more symmetrical. I'm sort of surprised Apple didn't do this sooner, but maybe they didn't want to be seen as copying the Pixel?
Back to the aluminum, the return to that material plus the new "vapor chamber" definitely keeps this thing running cooler. The most heat I tend to notice in my iPhones is actually usually when I'm setting them up when they're furiously downloading and indexing your digital life, and this was much better than last year. Of course, last year I also had a weird and painful 40-hour set up/restore. This year was a "mere" 4 hours thanks to using a cable. I'm still not entirely clear why this isn't far faster.
In actually using the device, the only thing I would say is that having more RAM seems noticeable thus far as apps are quitting and getting tripped up less often. Again, it's hard to know how much of this is just having a new iPhone versus more memory, but at least one of my most-used apps, Matter, which is my read-it-later service, seems to be performing much better for much longer on things like text-to-speech. On top of more battery options, I wish Apple let you pay to max out RAM on your iPhone. I would love and pay a lot for a 16 or 32 GB variety!2
The camera system was great and it remains great. The 8x zoom seems pretty solid, though others will be able to test that far better than I can. Ditto with the new selfie camera, which feels like a particularly fun addition this year.
1x vs. 8x
In terms of cases, I can now confirm in usage that the new 'TechWoven' is roughly 1,000x better than the failed 'FineWoven' variety. Not only is it clearly going to hold-up better, I think it actually feels far more premium too. I still miss leather, but Apple made their choice and this will do.
As previously noted, I also bought the "Cross-Body Strap" to carry my iPhone like Indiana Jones (my preferred analogy, versus the European Carry-All one). I'm still getting used to it and not sure it's really for me. But as someone who still has PTSD from an iPhone being snatched right out of my hands a few months ago, I definitely feel more secure in using it out and about...
Mainly, the thing I find myself thinking about while using the iPhone 17 Pro Max is that it may be the end of an era, in a way. Assuming the rumored timetables are true, we should see the mythical 'iPhone Fold' next year. And unlike the iPhone Air, I think I'll be making that jump. I like the Pixel Fold form factor and assuming Apple can improve the "crease" problem, this might be the last single slab of glass I carry around for a while. Unless the 20th anniversary iPhone tempts me back, of course.3 For now, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is the peak (pumpkin) phone.
There can be only one.
1 As someone who roots for both the Cleveland Browns (my hometown) and San Francisco Giants (my home of 20 years), I actually have quite a bit of orange in my life. Also, I grew up going to a school named "Orange" where the school colors were black and you guessed it. Also, I'm told by reliable sources – my wife and older daughter – that orange is very much in fashion thanks in part to Taylor Swift right now... ↩
2 Though I realize this would undoubtedly ding battery life and may cause some heat issues... And it's seemingly just not a path Apple wants to go down with developers being able to target more RAM for those who pay to upgrade. ↩
3 I suspect it will be quite hard to move from a foldable back to a "regular" smartphone, workflow-wise. But we'll see, I guess! Good problems to have – choices from Apple, for once. ↩
2025-09-30 16:56:04
Alexa Plus is smarter — but it’s not yet smart enough
Alexa Plus needs more
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
I've probably read a dozen such reviews by now of the not-exactly-new-any-longer but still not-exactly-widely-available-months-later Alexa+, they all seem to wrap their thoughts in this narrative that the new version is an upgrade, but nearly everything they're writing suggests that it's a downgrade.
This week, Amazon will launch new Echo hardware designed to supercharge Alexa Plus, the AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant. I’ve been using Alexa Plus for the last few months as part of its Early Access program, and while the new assistant is off to a promising start, it’s still clearly a work in progress.
To fix Alexa, Amazon had to break it apart and rebuild it. The result is a hybrid smart home assistant and personal assistant, as well as Amazon’s answer to ChatGPT. Right now, it’s not doing any of those things well enough.
Read: it's a poor-performing smart home assistant, a poor-performing personal assistant, and a poor-performing chatbot. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Yes, we all know what Amazon had to do after making the mistake of thinking they could do it without doing that. But clearly there was still work to be done and yet they shipped it anyway. Why? Internal pressure? For all his talk of seeking absolute product perfection – which rang hollow – it feels like Panos Panay made the call that it was better to get something out there in the wild and iterate on the fly rather than waiting for perfection.
In a vacuum, that's fine. But Amazon doesn't operate in a vacuum in this space, they operate in millions of homes! Also, they had to be watching Apple's own AI shitshow unfolding (with some undoubtedly similar issues with upgrading Siri) and recognizing they needed to avoid that PR headache. All of which seems pretty clearly why the roll-out has been so slow and limited.
Today, running on underpowered hardware and with what feels like a surface-level integration into my smart home, Alexa Plus often leaves me frustrated. There’s power under that hood, but it feels largely inaccessible. The assistant desperately needs something to make it more compelling — and better hardware could be the answer.
I mean, maybe! But it sure doesn't sound like the hardware is the issue here. The answer will only come if Alexa+ is itself upgraded alongside any new devices.
Recently, Alexa and I chatted about the best ways to use my smart home gadgets to their full potential. It suggested possible routines, built the automations, tweaked them based on my feedback, and tested them — all in minutes, with no fiddling in the (still clunky) Alexa app. It even helped me set up a new air purifier and folded it into one of those routines.
But there are issues. Alexa Plus is noticeably slower, with some requests taking up to 15 seconds for a response. While turning on lights or adjusting a thermostat is fast enough (I assume due to using local connections over Matter), waiting for over 10 seconds for the weather or a song to play is tiresome.
Some basic features that used to work reliably now don’t or require new phrasing every time. My struggles to control my Alexa-enabled coffee machine persist, and I can’t get Alexa to consistently turn on my bathroom fan for a set period of time.
I used to say, “Turn on the bathroom fan for 15 minutes,” and it did it. Now, Alexa Plus tells me it has to create a routine to do that, and then doesn’t run that routine. Or it says, “Sure,” turns the fan on, but never turns it off. I’ve tried this a dozen times and haven’t had a consistent response yet.
Clunky. Slower. Tiresome. Unreliable. Inconsistent. Broken.
I mean, what about any of this sounds good? The fact that Alexa can handle multiple tasks at once? Can she though?!
One surreal moment: after weeks of Alexa Plus’ new voice, the old Alexa suddenly surfaced when the system hit a snag. “Sorry, something went wrong,” it said in that stiff, familiar tone. For a second, I wondered — is the old Alexa still in there, trying to get out?
That's a fun notion. That our old friend Alexa that actually worked is trapped in the cloud somewhere, a true ghost in the machine.
The next several paragraphs go on making excuses for Amazon here, but again, it all just reads as pretty inexcusable. If they weren't ready to ship an Alexa+ that could take over for Alexa, they shouldn't have. Or they should have shipped it as something else, perhaps a new chatbot – with a different name – to have the fun conversational back-and-forths Panay clearly wanted. You could have seen a world in which "Alexa" invoked the tasks and routines while "Axel" could have been your new buddy to chat with. (Or perhaps even better, how about, I don't know, "Claude"?) It's silly to have two, of course. And eventually they merge, but not until the system is fully ready. Which it is clearly not.
That's seemingly closer to the approach Google has been taking with Gemini and their OG "Assistant". They've been slowly but surely swapping the engine mid-flight and we may see the culmination of that tomorrow – one day after Amazon's event, when Google is hosting their own event related to their Home devices.
As an Alexa household for years now, my hope is that Amazon isn't just rushing to beat Google out the door here. Or maybe they think Google hasn't actually solved the whole get-a-non-deterministic-chatbot-to-do-deterministic-things challenge either? Or maybe they've just been holding back a version of Alexa+ that is actually ready for prime-time now? But I'm pretty skeptical as all of this was extremely predictable.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2025-09-29 18:10:33
Something I think about on nearly a daily basis is how much time I've wasted of my life clicking away cookie banners. Sure, it's a few seconds here and there, but those add up in aggregate. And I, like everyone who lives in Europe, am doing it many, many times a day. Every day. And some have been doing this for over 15 years now...
And it's actually worse than tedious or time-wasting, it actually does the exact opposite of what the intent was: to make people more mindful of their privacy and give them more control. No one reads these anymore, no one. I see you piping up, privacy person... No one. No one. No one. No one.
European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are “strictly necessary” to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.
“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman.
The better way to do this, obviously, is to set such consents at the browser level. Once. Not every day, multiple times a day, for over 15 years. If a user wants to change something, let them change it in settings. And maybe there can be a browser setting to remind people of their privacy/cookie settings once a year or some other time interval that a user sets, if they care.
Most users, of course, do not care. Which I know makes these privacy people sad, but it's reality. And we've lived under their thumb for far too long.
Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.
A note sent to industry and civil society attending a focus group on Sept. 15, seen by POLITICO, showed the Commission is pondering how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once (for example, in their browser settings) instead of every time they visit a website.
This is so obvious that you have to assume it's not going to happen simply because it has been obvious for the past 15+ years and yet nothing has changed. Because Europe is going to Europe, but especially when it comes to anything having to do with tech.
I complain about this every so often – and even go viral on this topic every so often.1 And each time, many people respond with a range of services – mostly browser extensions, but some apps too – that auto-dismiss such pop-ups. The problem here is twofold: first, which they work sometimes, they certainly don't work all of the time. Second, 99.9% of users will never use/install such tools. This needs to be changed at the EU level.2
I would like to know how much of my life in aggregate how now been spent clicking on consent pop-ups. And I would like the EU to compensate me for this time.
— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) January 29, 2024
1 And yes, I know – thanks to about 2,000 replies – that it's not technically GDPR that mandates these pop-ups (well, not always, anyway). But humorously, one proposed change here is to put these consents under GDPR... ↩
2 Also, while as you may have heard, the UK left the EU some time ago, one upside of that change was remarkably not doing away with this cookie consent nonsense. The banners are alive and well in the UK... ↩
2025-09-28 02:04:19
If ever there was a demographic for Warner Bros Discovery to market to with One Battle After Another I’m right in it. Paul Thomas Anderson has made several of my favorite films. And not just the obvious ones like There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights — I love Magnolia and saw it opening weekend in theaters back in 1999 where I distinctly recall many people walking out when [spoiler alert — can it still be a spoiler alert 26 years later?] frogs started falling from the sky. It’s still one of my favorite experiences in a theater — Anderson had made the audience, who perhaps thought they were coming to see a Tom Cruise movie, so angry with one single scene that they left. Anyway, when P.T. Anderson has a new movie, I’m your guy.
But a funny thing happened on the way to seeing One Battle After Another in theaters. I had seen the trailer a number of times and honestly, I thought it looked a bit… dumb? Far too silly for my taste. Far more so than Inherent Vice! It left me feeling that Anderson might have his first real misstep. And given my love of his catalog, I was annoyed by this. So I was in no hurry to go see the movie.
Well, it now looks like I was right and very wrong.
By all accounts, One Battle After Another is one of the, if not the, best movie of the year. And also one of Anderson’s best movies. The critics and audiences seem fully aligned on these points. And so now I feel silly not going to see it opening weekend (to be fair, I was also traveling). But I feel more silly in doubting Anderson here.
But that doesn’t mean I was wrong with my thoughts on the trailer. I view myself as somewhat of a trailer connoisseur, with a long track record of being able to tell how a movie will perform simply based on the trailer. I even used to run a blog devoted to this notion! It’s harder now than it has ever been because marketing is so far beyond simply trailers these days. But for the most part, if a trailer sucks (at what it's trying to convey), the movie is going to bomb.
And, well, One Battle After Another is going to bomb. Again, not because it’s bad — it’s the opposite, apparently! — but because from the trailer on down, it was just marketed all wrong, and seemingly had a bad roll-out strategy.
Now, the trades are about to tout this as Anderson's best opening ever. And, sure. But that's a bit like touting Ichiro hitting a record number of home runs in a year. It's just not what the guy does. Coming in with a likely $21M opening can be framed as a success in that way, I guess. But if we're being honest, we're grading on a curve here – and one not taking inflation into account, naturally.
More to the point, the movie also cost a reported $130M to make — before marketing. That may push the total cost to $200M. That means the movie is going to need to pull in somewhere in the $300M to $400M range to break-even at the box office. And with a $20-ish million opening, that is just very, very unlikely to happen.
I mean, stranger things have happened, such as when another movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio opened with twenty-some million at the box office in 1997, which seemed like a problem given the movie was reported to be the most expensive movie ever made at the time and was massively delayed. But then it kept making $20M every single weekend for the next many weeks. Until it became the highest grossing movie of all time, at the time.
So yeah, that was weird. But it was also word-of-mouth. And if ever a movie can also benefit from such buzz in 2025, it feels like One Battle After Another is that movie. But it’s also not the epic love story with the perfect song. They both are around 3 hours long, but an R-rated film full of political statements and not rags-to-riches glamour feels like, well, a tougher sell.
And again, 2025 just makes it a tougher sell still. That $28M opening for Titanic in 1997 is more like a $60M opening in 2025 dollars. That’s pretty respectable.
This is where film Xitter gets angry. "It’s about the art, not the box office!" Which is true, but also false. If movies like these keep performing poorly, eventually they will stop making them. Yes, even P.T. Anderson movies. That is the cold hard reality of the business in this era. You either die the theatrical hero or live long enough to see your movies go straight to streaming. Believe me, I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but it is what it is.
And one way to at least slow that reality is to market such films correctly and have a good overall release strategy. Forget Peyton Manning or whatever silly ideas you have to appeal to the youths. We don’t need Fortnite characters here — this really happened, apparently! We just need a solid trailer and to let good, old fashioned word-of-mouth do its thing. This was, perhaps, overthought.
It also means a movie like this probably doesn’t open in 7,000+ screens. You go far more bespoke to start. Focus on Anderson's love of eclectic film formats. Get the word of mouth going as that will so obviously be the key here. I know that seems impossible to do with a $200M movie, but it’s better than the movie opening in a bunch of half-empty theaters around the country.
The movie is great, that’s the strength. It's that simple. Use that, don't try to squeeze it into viral moments – especially when your talent isn't particularly suited to that. I realize that’s a decidedly old school approach and tactic, but that was the play here. Anderson is not Christopher Nolan making massive epics, his movies take a far more nuanced approach to market.
Anyway, I’ll get off the soap box now and go buy a ticket.
Update September 28, 2025: The weekend tally has risen slightly to $22.4M per Brooks Barnes of NYT. But as he also notes, the second weekend will bring a new challenge with a new out-of-the-blue Taylor Swift movie to market her new album release hitting theaters and undoubtedly blow the box office doors off...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2025-09-27 00:52:42
At just 182 words, the latest Sam Altman blog post sort of reads like “well, we’re doing a $100B deal with NVIDIA, I guess someone should say something.” And, to be fair, it’s more substantive than the 49-word press releases that OpenAI and Microsoft jointly issued around their intent to reach a new deal. Still, by far the most interesting bit seemed to be at the very end when Altman wrote the following:
Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it; given how increasing compute is the literal key to increasing revenue, we have some interesting new ideas.
Not since the Jeffrey Epstein birthday card has a message been so vaguely intriguing. Has ChatGPT brought another wonderful secret to the world of finance? A mysterious new model for paying for expenditures? It’s possible! But actually, based on various other statements and reporting on the topic, it seems like we may be able to triangulate what they’re talking about already. Plus, as with all these AI data center dealings, which are always convoluted and sometimes circular, I feel the need to write them down just to wrap my own head around them.
First and foremost, the newly appointed co-CEO of Oracle, Clay Magouyrk, seemed to echo Altman’s statements about this mysterious new form of corporate finance when talking about data center dealings, as Cade Metz reports for The New York Times:
Oracle will pay for and oversee the construction of three of the new data centers. OpenAI will then purchase computing power from Oracle. Oracle’s co-chief executive Clay Magouyrk said that the cloud computing giant would pay for the construction of these facilities partly by exploring new kinds of financial deals with various partners, technology providers and other investors.
“It is a combination of working with all the right partners and providers to bring all of their capital bear as well as interesting new corporate structures and interesting new ways of doing financing,” he said.
That's now two statements around the general topic with two mentions of "interesting" – how interesting!
Oracle, of course, is a major OpenAI partner in various ways — most recently to the tune of an, um, $300B contract between the two for OpenAI to purchase server capacity in Oracle data centers from 2027 onward. This is a part of the previously announced Stargate project, which seems to be morphing in real time. The latest news on that front says that while Oracle will be in charge of three new massive data centers set to come online in the coming years, SoftBank will be in charge of another two. OpenAI will be a partner in all of those, obviously. As will NVIDIA, since their chips will be powering these data centers, naturally.
But the OpenAI/NVIDIA deal is a bit different, it seems. Most notably, it sounds like OpenAI will be the company building, owning, and operating a new data center (or possibly data centers) with upwards of 10GW of capacity.
In order to do this, OpenAI will need money, obviously. And part of that money will come from NVIDIA with their (up to) $100B commitment as capacity comes online, and starting with a $10B commit to kick off the project. For that capital, NVIDIA will get equity in OpenAI but it also seemingly unlocks a new business model for both companies. As reported by Anissa Gardizy and Sri Muppidi of The Information:
OpenAI and Nvidia are discussing an unusual way to structure their new artificial intelligence data center partnership, under which OpenAI would lease Nvidia’s AI chips rather than buying them, according to two people who spoke to executives at the companies about it.
This reporting has subsequently been backed up by Tim Bradshaw, George Hammond, and Stephen Morris for The Financial Times as well. And while it’s not exactly a new concept for OpenAI since they also lease/rent server capacity from many clouds at the moment, the difference here is the ability to lease the chips directly from NVIDIA for their own data centers as mentioned above. And for NVIDIA to lease these to a data center rather than selling them outright to the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, etc. This also includes their big “neocloud” partners like CoreWeave.1
Such an arrangement should allow OpenAI to save money — 10% to 15% by some estimates — which at the levels we’re talking about, is a lot of money! It also means OpenAI won’t be left holding the inventory bag as these chips depreciate. And because OpenAI will always want to be on the cutting edge with the latest NVIDIA chips, this model seemingly makes more sense for them. And the assumed promise of ongoing contracts for cutting-edge chips to OpenAI means a constant and consistent revenue stream for NVIDIA, who presumably can also re-purpose the older chips better than OpenAI would be able to. (Oh yes, and getting that nice equity slug in OpenAI helps grease all these wheels too.)
NVIDIA in turn can use these contracts with OpenAI to take out debt to buy servers from other partners like Dell to help build the full systems for OpenAI to lease. One (major) problem with OpenAI trying to build their own data center was that any debt provider is going to be awfully wary of lending them money that they’re uncertain they can pay back — because OpenAI, of course, has no actual profits. And doesn’t project having any such profits until at least 2030 now.
And yet debt is how you do these deals. Even companies like Meta, which gushes profits, uses debt for these build-outs. And so NVIDIA is in a way becoming OpenAI’s way to build a massive data center without needing to raise their own debt. NVIDIA is raising it, backed by… OpenAI’s contracts!
But wait, that contract also isn’t being paid for with profits because again, OpenAI doesn’t have any. But they do have a lot of capital thanks in part to… NVIDIA! And that’s obviously part of why some are dubious of such deals. But it’s actually more tangled with this debt in the mix. Again, NVIDIA is giving OpenAI money in part to lease chips from NVIDIA which NVIDIA will then use to raise debt to finance the build out of a data center that OpenAI will own.
I mean...
At this point I have to assume there will be another wonderful secret of finance in all this. Because a way to lease GPUs directly from NVIDIA in order to finance data center build-outs is somewhat interesting in its circular nature, but not that exciting. Perhaps that excitement comes from how these players think it can scale? I’m guessing we’ll hear something about how this will create a virtuous cycle where AI demand funds AI build out which fuels AI demand. But if any part of that cycle were to slow — let alone break… Hopefully an NVIDIA always pays its debts.
1 Though the deal with CoreWeave is even more complicated in that NVIDIA has a deal to “lease back” capacity from them if capacity goes unsold — yes, NVIDIA leases back capacity on NVIDIA chips owned by CoreWeave — that’s how circular this all is! ↩
2025-09-26 17:49:51
At first, I was sure this was some sort of miscommunication:
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order approving a proposal that would keep TikTok alive in the U.S. in a transaction that Vice President JD Vance said values the business at $14 billion.
$14B. It's a number so comically low that it would seem more believable if it was what one entity was paying for 10% of the company. But no, everyone is reporting the same thing: $14B is the amount being paid for 100% of the new company. Well, technically they're paying less than that because of the (just under) 20% being retained by ByteDance, while current ByteDance investors get to roll stakes over (while also putting some new money in).
But just how small is $14B? ByteDance itself is worth north of $300B – with secondaries currently trading in the $400B range. Yes, there's more to ByteDance than TikTok, but it's a huge part of the value. And yes, this is just the US portion of the service being sold, but it's also undoubtedly the most lucrative part given the importance and usage in the American market.
ByteDance investors like General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia, are expected to contribute equity in the new TikTok U.S. entity, sources told Faber. ByteDance was reportedly valued at $330 billion last month. Analysts have previously estimated TikTok’s U.S. operations could be worth between $30 billion to $35 billion.
Even $30B to $35B feels comically low here. ByteDance's overall revenue was $155B last year and again, TikTok drives a large portion of that – and presumably most of the international sales, which were just under $40B. Again, just the US business is going to be a large portion of that, but even the most conservative estimates there think it's north of a $10B a year business right now. So these investors are paying something like a 1x multiple which is absolutely silly.
So where does $14B come from? Nobody knows. But one guess may be Snap, which is currently valued in the public markets at... $14B. But Snap famously has monetization challenges where TikTok does not. In no way should that be the comp here. And even Snap has a 2.5x revenue multiple! Other would-be comps range from 3x all the way past 10x. And those are public companies, TikTok will be a private and still fast-growing startup. It would not be crazy to value it well north of $100B.
So yeah, this is perhaps the most sweetheart of sweetheart deals. Are there risks? Of course. And I'm quite skeptical this will actually work out well. But that doesn't change the current value of the property, which is being comically discounted here.
One more thing:
“It’s owned by Americans, and very sophisticated Americans,” Trump said at the signing. “This is going to be American operated all the way.”
Ah yes, except for, you know, the Abu Dhabi-based firm MGX (great name), which will own some large slug of the 45% the new investor groups are getting. Presumably, they're going to own north of 10% of this new TikTok by themselves. I guess technically they won't be "operating" the new TikTok, but it's a sort of odd statement to make, unless the investor reporting is inaccurate. But it sure sounds like MGX has been mentioned as a major new investor in all the recent reports (perhaps swapped in for a16z who is no longer being mentioned?!). Maybe President Trump was unaware of that change, but probably not. This has all been one big gameshow.
Also, one nugget from the Lauren Hirsch, Tripp Mickle, and Emmett Lindner report on the matter for The New York Times:
MGX has been discussing the TikTok investment for months, according to two people familiar with the talks. It was one of several companies in the TikTok deal that stood to benefit from the Emiratis’ data center project. Oracle will be building a data center that will cost about $20 billion in the Emirates. Silver Lake, an investment company, has a stake in one of the partners in that project, G42, an Emirati A.I. company.
Yes, TikTok is being sold for less than the cost of a single data center. One which all of these parties are affiliated with – funny that.
Update: A new report by Bloomberg (un-bylined, per their usual with China-related reporting) perhaps gives more color as to why the price is so low. It's extremely convoluted, but the short of it is that ByteDance may retain rights for upwards of 50% of any profit coming out of TikTok US, despite their less than 20% stake.
So if you're truly valuing the company based on future profits... I mean, maybe? But again, this is not a public company. And actually, you know who else is set up to give a massive percentage of future profits to other entities? OpenAI. That hasn't stopped that startup from being valued upwards of $500B now...
But in general, this reporting just backs up my thought that this new TikTok US is perhaps not set up well for long-term success...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
