Photo by Cheng Xin/Getty Images

GOING VERTICAL

ByteDance is now worth $300 billion, a fraction of rival Meta, despite growing faster

Meta took 18 years to hit $100 billion in annual revenue. ByteDance has done it in just over a decade.

11/18/24 10:15AM

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance valued itself at $300 billion in a recent buyback offer, marking one of the highest valuations ever for the Chinese tech company, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend. That’s roughly double what AI giant OpenAI is worth, and ~5x that of e-commerce upstart Shein.

The continued uptick in the company’s valuation is perhaps no surprise given the speed of its ascent, with ByteDance’s revenue growing another ~30% last year. That took it over the $100 billion mark, a feat which only one other social media platform has achieved (Meta), and it’s showing few signs of slowing down: a report from The Information detailed that ByteDance has grown 35% in the first half of this year, which could put it on track to hit $145-150 billion in sales for 2024.

ByteDance revenue vs. Meta — Sherwood News

With Reuters reporting that ByteDance has no IPO plans in sight, the buyback program is a way of providing the company’s shareholders — who are sitting on a potential goldmine — with liquidity. The recent deal is the third buyback program since 2022. The round in December 2023 boosted its valuation to $268 billion.

Going vertical

You could argue that ByteDance’s valuation is not that high on a relative basis. Meta’s market cap (~$1.4 trillion) is more than 10x its latest full-year of revenue — ByteDance’s is just 2.7x its own. That reflects a few differences, including the fact that ByteDance is not a pure advertising company in quite the same way Meta is, generating a substantial portion of its sales from e-commerce (which likely produces a slimmer margin).

It might also partly reflect the prospect of a looming TikTok ban in the US, where the app has 170 million users. Largely in the context of national security concerns, President Biden signed a law this April that gave ByteDance until early January to sell TikTok or face a ban. Former president Trump once favored the pending ban but recently reversed his stance.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5