Tech
More questions than answers surround Trump’s TikTok deal
President Donald Trump insists he has found a solution to keep TikTok alive in the United States through a group of investors who will buy the short-video app from its Chinese owners in accordance with US law.
But questions remain unresolved about how this will play out and what it means for American users.
Is there actually a deal?
Any sale of TikTok’s US operations would require Chinese owner ByteDance to divest. That would need approval from China’s government, which is reluctant to see a national champion forced out of its largest market as a trade war rages with an increasingly protectionist Trump.
While the Trump administration has insisted that China has accepted a deal for the sale, there has been no confirmation from Beijing. Queries to TikTok and ByteDance have gone unanswered.
“This deal is still very confusing in terms of what is exactly going on,” University of Florida media professor Andrew Selepak told AFP.
Is Trump taking over TikTok?
In an executive order signed on Thursday, the White House outlined a deal centered on key investors with close ties to the president.
Trump has specifically named Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a longtime ally and the world’s second-richest man, as a major player in the arrangement. For decades, Ellison has been one of Silicon Valley’s few high-profile Republicans in a tech sector dominated by liberal politics.
Ellison is returning to the spotlight through his dealings with Trump, who has brought his old friend into major AI partnerships with OpenAI, for example.
The 81-year-old has also backed his son David’s acquisition of Hollywood studio Paramount and is reportedly eyeing Warner Brothers.
The investor group also includes 94-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who control Fox News.
Whether this signals a conservative rebranding of TikTok—a platform Trump credits with helping him reach young voters—remains unclear. Trump denied this possibility on Thursday.
The prospect of a right-wing shift, or increased government intervention in media, has raised concerns that key platforms are falling under conservative control, potentially limiting diverse viewpoints in a bitterly divided America.
The fate of TikTok will be decided amid major shifts across social media platforms.
Elon Musk has transformed X (formerly Twitter) into a vehicle for far-right politics, driving away many establishment media outlets and liberal users.
Meanwhile, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has aligned with Trump and overhauled content moderation on Facebook and Instagram to address Republican claims of anti-conservative bias.
Why so cheap?
At Thursday’s White House ceremony, Vice President JD Vance pegged the deal at $14 billion. That’s a surprisingly low figure given Twitter’s $44 billion valuation when it sold and TikTok’s unique reach among young consumers in the world’s largest economy.
Bloomberg reporting helped shed light on the modest price tag: unnamed sources indicated that ByteDance would retain significant value through an expensive licensing arrangement, potentially receiving about half of the new company’s profits even if the company would hold just a 20% stake, according to Trump’s plan.
Such terms could trigger alarm in Washington, where some lawmakers could scrutinize whether any sale meets the requirements of the divest-or-ban law that should have taken effect in January but has been repeatedly delayed since Trump took office.
And confusingly, the executive order announced Thursday extended the deadline to ban TikTok until mid-January to finalize a deal that the Trump administration simultaneously claimed was already complete.
John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reiterated this point on Friday and warned that he would be “conducting full oversight over this agreement.”
“ByteDance has shown time and again that it is a bad actor,” he said.
The Trump plan “offers vague assurances about protecting US national security but provides virtually no specifics,” said Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law.
Adding to skepticism: Ellison’s Oracle already manages TikTok’s data servers from an earlier attempt to address US security concerns. Critics question whether this deal changes anything substantive.
© 2025 AFP
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Tech
6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On
After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.
For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.
WIRED Featured Deals:
Anker Laptop Power Bank for $88 ($47 off)
We love this beefy power bank. Its 25,000-mAh capacity is more than enough for fully charging your iPhone between 4 and 6 times, and it can deliver up to 165 watts to two devices meaning that you can charge your laptop, gaming console, or anything else you fancy. The built-in USB-C cable doubles as a carrying loop. There’s also a nifty display that’ll give you at-a-glance information on remaining battery, temperature, charging speeds, and more. It has pass-through charging support and only takes about two hours to fully recharge. This deal price matches what we saw on Black Friday.
Google Pixel 10 for $599 ($200 off)
There was an on-page coupon (PIXEL10) that had the best price we’ve tracked for any of the phones in the Google Pixel 10 lineup. That coupon is not available as of Saturday morning, but it may be back—clip it if you see it. This is still a good deal on the smartest Android phones you can buy, with fantastic cameras, snappy processors, gorgeous displays, and more AI integration than the average person needs. Check out our dedicated buying guide to figure out which Google Pixel 10 is right for you. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, now is a good time to buy considering that we’ve never seen any phone in this flagship lineup sell for less.
Bruvi BV-01 Brewer Bundle for $228 ($120 off)—Clip the Coupon
I’ve tested a lot of pod coffee makers, and the Bruvi BV-01 is my favorite. This deal price is the best we see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The brewer is cute and looks great on a counter, with a large reservoir, an intuitive touchscreen display, and a built-in wastebin that collects used pods for you. The best part are the proprietary B-Pods, which are designed to biodegrade in a landfill. The bundle gets you the machine plus an assortment of bestselling coffee and espresso pods to get you started.
Fitbit Charge 6 for $100 ($60 off)
The Fitbit Charge 6 has been at the top of our fitness tracker buying guide since we first tested it. It’s attractive, affordable, accessible, and on sale for a match of the best deal we’ve seen. It’ll play well with iOS and Android, and it has a solid suite of features that’ll cover almost anyone’s needs—including skin temperature, heart rate readings, ECGs, activity and workout tracking, and more. The battery lasts for at least a week on a single charge. This deal comes with a six-month subscription to Fitbit Premium, which normally costs $10 per month.
Hydro Flask Standard Mouth Water Bottle for $30 ($10 off)
This budget-friendly deal gets you a steal on the best reusable water bottle. Hydro Flask bottles are durable, portable, and easy to cover in all the stickers you’ve been hoarding. The handle is flexible, the bottle is leakproof, and every component is dishwasher safe (though you may want to opt for hand-washing if you do end up plastering it in stickers). A few different colors are on sale at this price.
Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)
If hitting the gym is one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are worth considering. They’re the best workout headphones we’ve tested thanks to their comfortable and ergonomic fit, noise cancelation, spatial audio, a heart rate monitor, and the fact that they play well with both iOS and Android phones. The sound is solid, the battery life is good, and they’re water-resistant. This deal price comes within $20 of the best we’ve seen. Every color—orange, lavender, grey, and black—is on sale.
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Tech
Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design
The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.
The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.
There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.
Oddly Familiar
In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
Tech
In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom
When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.
Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.
Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.
The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.
Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.
Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.
In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.
Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.
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