TikTok’s Shocking $14B Valuation, Google Antitrust Case, $10B Enigma of Mira Murati | Sep 26, 2025

0:12Welcome everyone to the information's TITB. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, September 26th, and we have got a packed show for you today exclusively with our own newsroom. We have got a great profile of Mira Mirati, the former CTO of OpenAI that I cannot wait to talk about with our AI reporter, Stephanie Palazzolo. We're also going to bring on our advertising reporter who has been covering the Google AdTech trial this week in Virginia at the courthouse. And we're going to be talking later on to our electric vehicles correspondent, Steve Levine, about a big story that he had this week. But I want to start with the big news out of TikTok.

0:53There was officially a deal for TikTok US in place announced yesterday. The White House signed an executive order approving a deal that will see TikTok's US business sold off for$14 billion. Any way you look at it, that is not a particularly high number, but just as interesting is who is getting involved in the deal. I want to bring on our Deputy Bureau Chief of Venture Capital, Katie Roof, to tell us more about what she's learned. Katie, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Great to be here. So let's talk about the$14 billion figure. Were you surprised by that? I mean, I was shocked.

1:30Absolutely. It seemed like the decimal point was maybe in the wrong place. People thought this was valued at like$400 billion at one point, and so$14 billion doesn't look similar to that. But as someone pointed out, there was one point when we thought it could go to zero because China threatened to shut it down. And so ultimately, because of the national security concerns, it put China in a position where they had to sell at a very steep discount. Right. And, you know, Martin Pierce, our co-executive editor, he wrote a column last night in the briefing talking about the valuation. You know, we've reported at the information that ByteDance's international revenue in the year 2024 was$39 billion.

2:19And, you know, if you take the international revenue and you kind of assume that, okay, most of that comes probably from TikTok talk in the US, call it$30 billion in revenue. I mean, this is not even one times revenue. I mean, this is tiny. But then we got news this morning from Bloomberg that there could be a profit sharing agreement in place. And so maybe this is more complicated than we thought. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the details are still being hashed out and who's owning what percentage and getting what boards see, it does sound like China and Chinese shareholders will still own part of the business, but they will not have a majority stake and that Oracle or U.S.

3:03entity will be controlling the security issues. But yeah, there's still a lot. I've talked to people involved who don't even seem to know what's happening because the news keeps changing on this and has been changing for five years. I've been looking into this situation since 2020, and it's always been changing and speculative, but now it seems like things are finally happening. Right. I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier, which is that at one point, zero dollars was a possible price tag in the mix. Why couldn't ByteDance get a higher price in this? Who do you think had the leverage here?

3:43Well, I think that the US government deliberately timed this during negotiations with tariffs. And so, you know, maybe one party is willing to negotiate at a discount on one issue if they can get a better deal on the other issue. And so that just probably gave the U.S. government more leverage. In other words, there's a broader plan, the delay, delay, delay. I mean, it's delay until the time is right and then strike seems to be seems to be part of the calculus here um you know i i want to talk about mgx which was the latest name added into the mix in terms of who could own the entity tell us a little bit about mgx and also did it surprise you that they were taking a stake here in the new entity well yeah it's surprising in the sense that they are an international party.

4:40And so if this is about, you know, America first in theory, you know, you're not, you wouldn't expect the major shareholders to be international. But then on the other hand, it's not surprising in the sense that MGX is getting very involved in a lot of things. They can write big checks. You know, they're in the UAE, which has really warmed up to the West and is on good terms with the United States. So I think maybe that's why they were allowed in the mix. What happens to the existing shareholders in ByteDance? That's the big question. What a roller coaster it's been. I've been covering ByteDance since it was musically.

5:27It used to be this popular app for young people who wanted to sing and dance, and then it turned into TikTok. And a lot of the shareholders have been in it that long where, you know, musically sold to ByteDance and it turned into what it is now. And so, you know, first their investment went up and up and up, and then it was, you know, they thought it would shut down. Now maybe it's worth$14 billion and they might have the option to buy more shares. So certainly not where they thought it was at one point, but the story with TikTok's not over. Right, right. Right. And an option to buy new shares.

6:04What do we know about that? Yeah. So the information is reported that existing shareholders should be given an option to buy more shares. We have yet to see who's planning to, you know, who's going to take up that offer and what the conditions are. But it sounds like there will be an opportunity to buy more. And then the question would be also what valuation they would buy the shares at, I guess, which is kind of an interesting question here. Before we let you go, I do want to ask you about sort of the story being in the developing phase right now. We saw the executive order last night, okay? It seems like things keep changing.

6:45Is this the deal, or what could you see still changing? What's still in flux? What questions are there still? I think some of the stakes have been reported, but some of the ownership stakes haven't. I'd like to know who's going to be the chairman of the board. I'd like to know the details on how Oracle will be controlling the security. If China is still a large shareholder, are they going to have a lot of influence still? There's a lot of questions that haven't been answered. Right. Great. Well, Katie, thank you so much for coming on and sharing that with us through that analysis. I'm sure that you're going to be making some more calls today.

7:32And so maybe we'll bring you back on next week to hear about what you learned. That is Katie Roof, our Deputy Bureau Chief at The Information. Okay, well, this week, Google is in court once again to decide how it will resolve the issue of part of its ad tech business being deemed a monopoly. I want to bring on our tireless advertising reporter, Catherine Perloff, who has been on a marathon reporting trip covering the trial on site at the courthouse to break down everything that she has learned and where she's expecting things to go from here. Catherine, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.

8:08Hello. So it's been a tiring week. Gosh, you've been in court all week. Yeah. And you can't have your phone in this court. So you're writing by hand. So you're like, that's kind of nice, right? I mean, you know, you get to disconnect a little bit with all the nitty gritty of ad tech law in front of you. That's true. And not get notifications from work for better or worse. Okay, let's get into it because it's kind of a complicated one. I want to try to keep as high level as possible. Just very quickly, remind us, so Google's ad tech businesses is a part of the ad tech business that helps publishers, websites sell their advertisements online.

8:50Just a quick recap, the judge ruled that that part of the business had a monopoly, and now we are in court again to try to figure out what the correct punishment should be for Google. And so these are arguments going back and forth about what is fair. Talk to us about you know, what we learned this week from all the arguments in court. Yeah, well, the government is pushing for a breakup. They want Google to have to sell the part of the business the judge deemed a monopoly, which specifically are Google's tools for publishers, so for the sell side to sell ads on their sites and not the buy side ad tech tools.

9:33Um, and, um, the government is, or sorry, and that Google is arguing that, um, that will not be necessary and, um, that they have a set of behavioral remedies that will sort of, uh, remove some of the concerns the judge had, uh, about the fact that they're linking these two businesses together and making it hard to use one of their products without using another one of their products. And they say that's sufficient. And, you know, also, you know, we just had a ruling in another ad tech or sorry, ad tech, antitrust case against Google where a judge decided that a breakup was overreach. And I think they're trying to get some points on that as well.

10:19And so just to remind people, putting this into perspective, the decision out of the first case, I guess, where they had the remedies trial was that Google should not have to sell Chrome, essentially. I think going into this one, a lot of people thought, hey, a sale of the ad tech business could be more likely. As the week has progressed on, has it felt like that is going to be the case? What has the judge said about how they're thinking about this? You know, I do think it's definitely more likely, it felt like, especially because actually earlier this month in Europe, there was a similar decision about the ad tech business.

11:02And they haven't fully said what they want to do, but they said they would like to break it up. So there's a lot of pressure on this. But the judge, you know, we don't know exactly what she's thinking. But yeah, it's just her making the decision. There's no jury. So what she says in court, you know, is always pretty valuable. A couple interesting things she said. First, she sort of pointed out that, you know, what if the remedies that the government is suggesting increase competition, but the overall market that this is concerned with, which is ads on websites, declines? and that, you know, that's kind of been happening a little bit.

11:46Like, you know, the market for people are spending less money on advertising on the web versus on streaming or versus in social platforms and this app. And I think, you know... And so this is the idea, this is sort of a similar idea, I guess, that came up in the last case, which is that AI has changed the game a bit and that the market for selling ads is shrinking. And so why would you try to stifle that market, essentially? Yeah, exactly. You know, the market forces are going to regulate itself. And so that's sort of an argument Google's been trying to make. And the judge's question, which is like, you know, competition could increase, but the market could go down.

12:27And, you know, maybe a breakup makes this worse because if Google's not investing in this market, maybe they're going to prefer other channels, which is an argument Google is making. We don't know really what will happen. Um, uh, she, she seemed to ask about, so that kind of struck a chord with her. Um, another thing she said during the trial was like, she asked if, you know, what if, um, instead of selling these businesses, one of, one of the products in question, what if we just shut it down? And, um, instead, you know, publishers could use sort of an open source solution that is, uh, popular right now.

13:08I'm not going to get into all the weeds there because it's a very complicated case, but just kind of interesting that shows that the judge seems to be questioning the feasibility and being very careful about whether a sale is really the right option. And even coming up on the stand with creative solutions that we haven't really thought of yet. Well, and I think that's interesting because that is sort of what we saw a little bit in the last case with the search-related case that surprised people was that they were actually sort of acknowledging, hey, the game has changed a little bit since this case first began.

13:47I want to talk to you about sort of the feasibility of actually selling this part of the business at all. You know, you wrote a brief last night for us talking about some of the history that Google had actually tried doing this before. What did we learn about that? Yeah, the technical feasibility is a really big issue in this case because I think Google wants to argue that, you know, their ad tech is too connected to their other, you know, tech systems, their other infrastructures, so it would be impossible to spin out. But on the stand, a Google VP of ads testified that they had previously, both in 2023 and 2024 and earlier around 2021, had looked at how they might spin this out.

14:36The key difference, at least in their most recent effort to think about a sale and what the government is proposing, is that Google would have sold the contracts and the business part, but not the underlying technology. They would give a sort of guide for whoever the buyer would be to recreate it, but they wouldn't sell the underlying source code. And the government wants that to happen. And they also want maybe Google to open source part of their technology. Which, yeah. This is kind of interesting too, because we're sort of seeing some version of that play out with the TikTok story, which is that, hey, you know, it's the underlying technology, which is really the value here.

15:23It's not just the front end of the app. And so it sounds like, you know, that has always been a consideration for Google as well. Very quickly, before we let you go, you're going to be at the courthouse next week as well? Actually, mercifully, no. Okay, all right. Well, all right. Just today, just today. But the trial is going on next week. So what are you watching for? What should we be, you know, aware of as we see the headlines come out next week? Yes. I think, you know, we should be paying attention. I'll be there today. And then, you know, that what I think the most interesting thing that comes up in these situations is sort of like what is revealed about like the business that we didn't know before because that evidence comes up in court.

16:13And sometimes like internal emails come up. I mean, you know, we got Google to confirm, which there have been reports of, that they had considered selling this business, that they're fighting so hard in court not to sell. And they actually learned they considered some other creative alternatives, like moving part of the business into Google Cloud and selling it kind of as a software as a service product, which is a little bit different as to how it's charged now. So I think it's really interesting to learn just like things we didn't know about Google's business. And then I think we also should be paying attention to, again, how the judge is reacting.

16:47You know, who is sort of scoring points with the judge? because ultimately she's going to make the decision as to whether they have to sell them this thing. Right, right. And very quickly, Catherine, just before we let you go, why didn't they end up selling the business when they tried? Did we get any insight there? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. On the stand, they didn't quite get into any of the rationale. They just sort of talked about a sales iteration. But there has been some reporting from Bloomberg that they're part of these efforts, at least the most recent ones, were, it seems like, partly trying to come to an agreement, but maybe there was some with the government, with this case, or they've also, you know, have these fights in Europe happening as well.

17:35So, trying to sort of figure out how do we get out of this legal battle. And it just seems like the terms or what they were willing to sell, as I said, not being the full tech stack, wasn't sufficient for the government. So that seems like what some of the reporting around this is. You know, it's not our reporting, so don't know fully if it's true. But, yeah, I think that they, I mean, it is worth noting that this business or sits in seemingly on Google's earnings or, you know, has been declining. So it kind of would make sense if they just wanted to get it. The market is, I mean, as you said, that's kind of the take-home here The market is changing, and it's interesting to see the judge acknowledge that and sort of look ahead.

18:18Catherine, thank you so much for coming on. Wishing you all the best with the final day of court proceedings today. We'll see you back here in the office next week. That is Catherine Perlop, our advertising reporter at The Information. Okay. If you are a close follower of OpenAI, you probably know the name Mira Marati. She was the former CTO of the company who left last year, and she's now building her own startup, Thinking Machine Labs. The company was last valued at$10 billion, and today, our AI reporter, Stephanie Palazzolo, published an in-depth profile of Mira Mirati and how people in her orbit think about her as a leader.

18:55Stephanie, it's great to have you. Welcome back to the show. Thanks. Great to be here. Okay, so let's talk about Mira Mirati. I want to talk about Thinking Machine Labs. There's a – I mean, gosh,$10 billion is a big number. We're going to get to that. I just want to rewind a little bit to when Mira Mirati left OpenAI, because I think it sets the stage for sort of what she's hoping to do with her new company. Why was it that she left the company? What was the disagreement a year ago that prompted her to sort of say, I'm going to go in on her own? Yeah, so Mira's departure from OpenAI was very sudden and I think very unexpected even to executives at the highest ranking levels at OpenAI.

19:38A lot of them didn't even know that she was planning to leave until she announced it, basically. And the reasons behind the departure aren't exactly clear, but we do know that she did play a role in the ouster of Sam Altman that had happened about a year prior. So when the board around that time had reached out to her, she had had multiple conversations with them about feedback she had and concerns she had around Sam Altman's management style. and we also know that she very quickly agreed to become the interim CEO after Sam was fired. But we do know that after that whole period, she very quickly kind of supported Sam.

20:18She signed this letter along with the vast majority of OpenAI saying that they would quit if the board didn't resign and Sam was brought back. But then she still left. After all that, she said, I still don't like it. Yeah, I think from our reporting, it does seem like there was a lot of bad blood still amongst her and the other execs. People definitely wondered what role she had in the ouster and whether or not she was kind of pro-Sam after that incident happened. Okay, so she goes it on her own, okay? And it was quite the departure, perhaps the highest profile departure from OpenAI. She's now building this company, Thinking Machine Labs.

20:56And the profile that you published today, I should say, it's in our weekend magazine, so everyone should go read it. What exactly do we know about what Thinking Machine Labs is trying to build? Yeah, so surprisingly very little. I think this is kind of a common theme with Mira. She's quite a mysterious person in AI. Mysterious Mira Morani, okay. But we do know that they told investors they want to come out with an enterprise product and a consumer product. But on the enterprise side, they're thinking about creating models that can basically be customized to a business's KPIs, which are basically a name for a metric that a business tracks to see how they're doing.

21:38On the consumer side, they're thinking about creating an AI assistant that consumers can talk to. But other than that, they've been very in stealth, very quiet, have basically said nothing about what they want to build. and even some other investors that I spoke with are not entirely sure what these products might look like, which is quite unusual. Right. And I have to read this one paragraph from the story because I think it actually very clearly articulates what you're saying. The passage reads, it was the most absurd pitch meeting, one investor who met Virati said. She was like, so we're going to do, we're doing an AI company with the best AI people, but we can't answer any questions.

22:19So even the investors are in the dark. My question for you is, I mean, what is it about her that they're so drawn to, you know, besides her history, which obviously being the CTO at OpenAI, you know, you get a lot of great goodwill that comes to that. But what is it about her exactly? Yeah. So I think it kind of boils down to two things. I think part of it is, as you mentioned, her history at OpenAI, but kind of the reputation that she built there. Many researchers there basically knew her as the quote-unquote internal CEO. As Sam was out fundraising and talking with politicians, business leaders, Mira was kind of the boots on the ground at OpenAI, like basically keeping things running well.

23:01And lots of researchers feel very positively about her. They really enjoyed working with her, had really great things to say about her basically when investors were doing their diligence. I think the second thing is not about Mira, but about this kind of team that she's been able to assemble around her. You know, as we've seen from obviously the meta kind of AI talent war, like research talent is everything these days. And so she's managed to assemble kind of this like Avengers of AI a little bit where you have, you know, people that created ChatGPT, like top safety execs from OpenAI, people that are very knowledgeable on post-training, which is this process that happens after the initial training of a model that's become very important these days.

23:44And so I think it's both a combination of Mira herself, but again, kind of this broader group of people that she's managed to kind of bring together for thinking. And just very quickly, how big is the company doing it? Do we know how many people she's assembled? Yeah, so we don't know the exact number, but it is still fairly small. I would say probably less than, you know, 50 or 100 people at this point. And we should say that this came up with the story. It's a barefoot, it's called the barefoot culture. Like no shoes, Paul. Sorry. Maybe not bare feet. It's just no shoes. Yeah. No, it's very like classic Silicon Valley, you know, all hands.

24:20People are sprawled out on bean bat. They're doing a shoes culture. Very classic. Yeah. I don't know if I would go for the barefoot, Paul. I think, you know, no shoes I can maybe get by. All right. Look, I do want to ask you, you didn't have a chance to speak with Mira Mirati for this profile. Of course, you know, we ask the question and the companies decide whether or not they want to participate. But if you did have an interview with Mira Mirati, what questions would you want to ask? Yeah. You know, again, with the kind of theme here of Mira being very mysterious, she doesn't talk to press very often.

24:54I think the one thing that I'm very curious about is kind of like, it's kind of like a deeper question, which is just, you know, what is kind of driving Mira in all this? What's her kind of religious mission here? I think whenever you look at all these AI startups, the leaders kind of fit into these nice little boxes, little stereotypes where you have, yeah, you have Elon who, you know, kind of wants to seek like the truth of the universe. And you have Dario at Anthropic, who's seen as this very, you know, safety focused AI leader who yeah wants to get to agi but is like so concerned with safety and the possibility of very dangerous things obviously you have sam sam altman who i think sam is everything i wanted everything sam is like uh you know a force in himself he loves the limelight um it talks a lot about you know ai's potential to cure cancer and all these things and i feel like mira it's not entirely clear kind of like what is driving her to do this you know does is she building towards AGI because she wants to cure cancer does she mostly just want to build like really incredible products for consumers that like get a lot of consumer love like it's not entirely clear to me kind of what's driving her here and I would love to talk with her about that so well what we're going to do is we're going to package this up okay we're going to put in a clip okay and We're going to send it to Mira.

26:15Mira, this is our open invitation to come on our show and answer that exact question that Stephanie has, which is that what is driving you to do all this? Because investors clearly believe it. $10 billion with no product, no revenue. There's a lot of confidence there, and we want to try to unpack it. So Stephanie, thank you for coming on the show. It's a great profile. I encourage everyone to give it a read. That is Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter at The Information. Okay, we all know that the government is Intel's newest shareholder, but this week we learned from my colleague Steve Levine's reporting that the Trump administration is also talking to some minerals companies about taking stakes in those businesses too.

26:56I want to bring on Steve to tell us more about what he knows about these critical minerals companies. Steve, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks. Thanks, Akash. Okay, so let's talk the wonderful business of critical minerals. So we understand it, and correct me here. Look, these minerals companies, they are very important for the manufacturing of the batteries that have become so key to the electric vehicles industry. Do I have that right? Yeah. Okay. All right. So we've got these companies, and very quickly before we get, I mean, what are the minerals? Let's just name the things that we're talking about here.

27:35Well, some of them, nickel, lithium, cobalt, copper. Great, great. Okay. So, you know, we have this story here. There's so many different angles we could go with it. How have these mineral companies been doing broadly from a performance perspective? Maybe let's start there, and that might give us a window into understanding why the government is looking to take a stake in it. Yeah. So where this comes from is that the, you know, very, very quickly, Biden administration got very heavily behind an EV industry, a battery industry, wanted the U.S. to establish these industries, compete on a global scale against China, which is the dominant player.

28:21And so through a lot of money, over$60 billion behind these companies in grants and loans. When Trump took power in January, he froze all that money. And so until now, these companies, which are startups, the industries aren't really going yet. They've been waiting for this money. And until then, they've been struggling, really. Some of them have gone out of business. A lot of them are on life support. And the news right now, why this is important is that we've learned that the Trump administration is prepared to free up at least some of the money in exchange for the government taking an equity stake in the companies.