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4:20 PM ET, December 19, 2025

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 Top News: 
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Internal memo: TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US unit; Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX will collectively own 45% of the US entity, and ByteDance will retain ~20%  —  TikTok has signed a deal to sell its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors, per an internal memo seen by Axios.
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Karl Bode / Techdirt:
The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China  —  There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it's somehow the worst …
Financial Times:
Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing  —  Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to invest in new data security joint venture as part of Trump-brokered deal
Bloomberg:
Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025  —  ByteDance Ltd. is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader …
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection
Paul Glynn / BBC:
HarperCollins UK drops children's author and comedian David Walliams following allegations of inappropriate behavior toward young women  —  Best-selling children's author and comedian David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher HarperCollins UK, the company has said.
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Google sues data scraping company SerpApi for allegedly using hundreds of millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted material from Google products  —  Google on Friday sued a Texas company that “scrapes” data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions …
Natalie Korach / @nataliekorach:
Sources: VF's article by Chris Whipple featuring quotes from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles led to VF's biggest subscription signup day since 2016  —  Scoop: Vanity Fair's bombshell Chris Whipple story including extensive interviews with Susie Wiles led to the biggest subscription signup day for the mag since 2016, according to people familiar, marking the first major win for editorial director Mark Guiducci
RELATED:
Shane O'Neill / Washington Post:
Q&A with Christopher Anderson, who photographed Trump's inner circle for VF: “My job is to ... draw on my experience as a journalist and photograph what I see”
Kirsten Chuba / The Hollywood Reporter:
TikTok's first awards show, held on December 18, handed out 14 awards, including Creator of the Year for Keith Lee; at the event, none of the screens worked  —  The event, which streamed live from the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday, handed out 14 awards and battled problems with its video screens.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Axel Springer has considered buying about a dozen media businesses in the US, including TED Conferences, TechCrunch, the 1440 newsletter, and more  —  Mathias Döpfner says ‘embrace AI or die’ as he looks to bolster his U.S. media holdings  —  Mathias Döpfner is hunting for “new gold” in media.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M  —  After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it's acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia.
Jennifer Maas / Variety:
The Kansas City Chiefs launch Foolish Club Studios, a first for an NFL team, to produce scripted and unscripted content that “might only be sports-adjacent”  —  The Kansas City Chiefs are the undisputed NFL team of choice for Swifties — but the team's ultimate goal is total world fandom domination.
Discussion: The US Sun and Chicago Tribune
 
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 More News: 
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) agree to buy WildBrain's 41% stake in Peanuts Holdings for ~$457M, raising Sony's stake to 80%
 Earlier Picks: 
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
YouTube streaming the Oscars in 2029 makes Netflix's WBD bid less likely to face antitrust issues, as it shows Netflix might need WBD to compete against YouTube
Emilio Casalicchio / Politico:
Downing Street makes changes to press access, cutting an afternoon briefing and promising more press conferences, which will be open to social media influencers
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
CBS News and The Free Press announce Things That Matter, a series of town halls and debates, starting in early 2026, with Sam Altman, J.D. Vance, and others
 

 
From Techmeme:

Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more

Physical Intelligence:
AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence says it saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process

Financial Times:
Sources: UK officials believe China was behind the October cyber attack on the UK's Foreign Office, which aimed to access tens of thousands of sensitive files
 
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