⚽ Ryan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney, Eva Longoria, and Kate Upton Buy Colombian Soccer Club La Equidad

In today’s newsletter we discuss Ryan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney, Eva Longoria, and Kate Upton Buy Colombian Soccer Club La Equidad, Perplexity AI makes an offer to merge with TikTok, China’s building a solar energy space station, a Florida man spites neighbors and builds house in front of theirs, and Donald & Melania Trump launch meme coins.

Scroll on!

WHAT WE’RE READING

🎇 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐀𝐈 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐓𝐢𝐤𝐓𝐨𝐤 🎇

Fox Business

I did not see this coming, and I’m guessing there are a lot of technorati out there whose jaws are on the floor right now wishing they had come up with this idea.

Perplexity AI has reached out to TikTok with an offer to merge, to combine into one of the leading AI and Social Media companies in the world.

It’s brilliant!

In one move Perplexity AI would:

📈 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

👫 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞

📺 𝐀𝐝𝐝 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦

💰 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬

🆓 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

🤖 𝐆𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐈 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞

TikTok still has a lot of options on the table, including:

• Stay a standalone company, despite U.S. legal rulings

• Sell to Elon Musk’s X/Twitter

• Sell to billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty

• Sell to MrBeast (although we’re pretty sure this was just a joke)

• Merge with Perplexity AI

Recap

In case you have an actual life IRL, let me catch you up on what you’ve missed (or not missed depending on your perspective).

The last 48 hours have seen a number of ups-and-downs in the TikTok saga. During the day on Saturday there was speculation that an 11th hour deal could be worked out to avert a complete shutdown. On Saturday night around 10 PM EST TikTok and all other ByteDance-owned apps went dark with messages that they were shutting down due to the U.S. ban going into effect. Then Sunday early afternoon TikTok was back online thanking the new incoming Trump administration (not sure how that works, since Donald Trump won’t even be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States of America until Monday, January 20). Apparently Donald Trump has reassured TikTok and Shou Zi Chew, who is coincidentally attending the Trump inauguration (I’m sure that’s completely unrelated), that he will enact a 90-day extension of the law to give TikTok time to find a buyer of at least 50% of the app – that’s the new talking points of a possible deal.

How’d we get here?

The first Trump administration started the legislation to ban TikTok, the congress during the Biden administration voted the ban into law, the U.S. Supreme court upheld the law, and then the Biden administration on Saturday deferred the enforcement of the ban to the incoming Trump administration. So now it is up to Donald Trump to either enforce the TikTok ban he originally started, or explain to the U.S. congress why he isn’t enforcing the law they passed.

It’s interesting, because for the first time in U.S. history there exists a difference between following the written law, respecting the law, and implementing the law.

Where we go from here

Honestly, who knows. Anyone that tells you they can predict what the incoming Trump administration is going to do is full of it. If I had to take a wild guess I’d predict that TikTok is either bought by or partners with an existing U.S.-based social media network (a la X/Twitter or a MrBeast run startup), and that a certain politician gets a “finders fee” for brokering all of this. But that’s just me; I’m jaded like that.

💵 Business

Meme coins are all the rage for the incoming President Trump and his wifey Melania, who each launched their own meme coins over the weekend. No one ever accused them of being good at branding, so of course they are each named the “Official Trump” $TRUMP and “Melania” $MELANIA meme coins. 

📡 Space

China’s hunger for energy has driven them to outer space with a plan to build what they are calling the “Three Gorges dam in space” in an effort to harness the solar power of the sun. No really! The plan is to build multiple solar power space stations that beam the energy down to earth via microwaves. This sounds like a movie I would definitely watch.

🔵 Social Media

It was a wild weekend in the world of social media, with TikTok banned in accordance with the U.S. congress passed law, then somehow they were unbanned (that’s a thing now?), and during all this drama social media companies rolled out press releases announcing new services.
 
Bluesky announced they are coming out with their own photo-sharing app to be called Flashes. It won’t exactly be an Instagram killer, but you can clearly see how they’re positioning themselves to be the non-Meta aligned alternative.

Speaking of Meta’s app ecosystem, Instagram is rolling out TikTok-like features. In a departure from their normal state, Instagram is introducing photo grids that will now display images as rectangles, rather than the app’s signature squares. Revolutionary! 🤦‍♂️

Instagram also announced they are straight up copying ByteDance’s CapCut, and introducing their own video editing app to originally be called Edits.

Is it too much to ask for a U.S.-based social media company to come up with something original instead of copying a banned Chinese app?!?!

🏠 Real Estate

Don’t ever underestimate the ability of a homeowner to spite their neighbors. A real estate developer in Florida refused to sell a narrow lot to neighbors who wanted to maintain the views. Instead, he built a 10-foot wide,1,547 square foot home that blocked the neighbor’s views, then sold the house for $619,000.

⚽ Sports

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are already the proud owners of the Wrexham AFC in Wales, UK. Back in the Spring of 2024 they teamed up with Eva Longoria to purchase a share of the century-old Mexican soccer Club Necaxa with a vision of launching a Wrexham-style TV show chronicling the Mexican soccer team. Following the investment Club Necaxa was valued at $200 million. A documentary-style TV show similar to “Welcome To Wrexham” has already been filmed featuring Club Necaxa, and Disney+ has bought the rights to steam it.

Now they’ve partnered with Eva Longoria and a consortium consisting of Major League Baseball pitcher Justin Verlander and his model wife Kate Upton, to purchase 99% of the Club Deportivo La Equidad, based in the Colombian capital of Bogota. The acquisition is said to have cost roughly $30 million dollars. No word yet on if another documentary-style TV show will be filmed, but it’s a pretty good bet since there’s clearly an appetite for all things Ryan Reynolds related.

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irl Media NEWSLETTER is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.