TNB Tech Minute: Trump Allies Trying to Delay TikTok Ban
WSJ Tech News Briefing
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Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, January 16th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. TikTok may have gained a new hope for survival. Its CEO, Shou Chu, is slated to attend Donald Trump's inauguration next week. The president-elect's advisors are also said to be searching for a way to delay or stop a U.S. ban of the popular video app.
According to people familiar with the matter, TikTok CEO is expected to sit among several high-profile guests, including Elon Musk, Amazon.com executive chairman Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of TikTok rival Meta Platforms.
The owner of Cash App has been hit with millions in fines from back-to-back settlements in the last 24 hours. Block Inc. was fined by dozens of state regulators and agreed to pay a settlement of $80 million. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau separately ordered the company to pay consumers up to $120 million in refunds and other compensation from fraud losses, as well as pay a $55 million fine to the CFPB's Victim Relief Fund.
The company neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in the settlement with state regulators, according to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. And Nintendo's widely anticipated Switch 2 gaming console will go on sale later this year. It is expected to give a much-needed boost to the Japanese company's financials and doesn't appear to stray too far from the original's popular hybrid design. No specifications were included, but Nintendo said it plans to share more details in April.
For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Friday's Tech News Briefing podcast.