if it does go through, there's the next story you're going to see in the Wall Street Journal is how much money the bankers are going to make on fees running the auction here. And and then the next story you'll see after that is going to be about how the tech and media landscape has been reshuffled and rewritten by the TikTok deal.View on YouTube
As of November 30, 2025, the forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. business has not actually been completed, only negotiated in principle.
After Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024, ByteDance faced a divest-or-ban deadline, upheld by the Supreme Court in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland. TikTok temporarily went offline in January 2025, after which President Trump delayed enforcement and began negotiating a divestiture framework. 【0search13】【3search19】
By mid‑September 2025, reporting described only a “framework of a deal” for the U.S. operations of TikTok to be sold to a U.S.‑led investor consortium (Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, others), with Trump extending the ban/divestment deadline to December 16, 2025. These accounts consistently characterize the arrangement as pending or to be finalized, not closed. 【1news11】【1news13】【3search18】【0news16】【0news17】
Because the divestiture/ownership transfer has not yet closed, the condition in Friedberg’s prediction ("if it does go through" – i.e., a completed forced sale/auction of TikTok’s U.S. business) has not been met. Without a completed deal, there is naturally no post‑closing media cycle yet that would focus on (1) disclosed advisory fees to investment banks for running a completed auction, and (2) retrospective analyses on how the tech and media landscape has been reshaped by a finalized TikTok ownership change.
Some coverage, including a WSJ‑based exclusive cited by Voz.us, discusses a proposed multi‑billion‑dollar fee the U.S. government might charge buyers for brokering the TikTok deal, and only mentions typical investment‑bank fee percentages as contextual background; it is not a WSJ feature about banks’ auction fees on a consummated transaction. 【2view0】
Given that the triggering event (a completed forced sale of TikTok U.S.) has not yet occurred, the prediction cannot be definitively judged right or wrong at this time; it remains contingent on future developments.