In his recently released memoir, Born To Be Wired, John Malone writes of attending the 1979 Western Show out in Anaheim, CA. What the TCI CEO witnessed fascinated him, but also terrified him. It was a proliferation of television stations sprouting up to meet the needs of a still small, but growing cable TV subscriber base. Think ESPN, Nickelodeon, HBO, etc.
Malone’s realization was that the cable companies with “scale” would be the winners in a still young industry. He immediately returned to Denver to figure out how to grow TCI even faster.
Malone’s glimpse into the future brings to mind TikTok in the present. Most if asked would say TikTok is a social media site where young people go for video content uniquely tailored to the tastes and interests of each individual visitor. Which presumably helps explain TikTok’s 170 million users in the U.S. alone: a remarkable ability to meet and lead the needs of individuals who are as different as they are numerous.
To which a much smaller number of people would, if asked, assert that TikTok is in truth an entity controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to pursue espionage activites on the American people. In this capacity, TikTok is allegedly controlled by the CCP to spy on and propagandize against the United States.
Of course, the certitude of TikTok’s politicized critics is belied by the app’s remarkable position in the most competitive marketplace in the world: the U.S. marketplace. Americans not only loathe lousy service and products that fail to meet and lead their needs (think government-run concepts like the DMV, Passport Office, Post Office, and surely more), but exactly because Americans are so prosperous, they don’t need to endure lousy, non-anticipatory service of any kind. In short, TikTok is not what its critics have long imagined it to be as a foreign policy threat to the United States, and that’s precisely because it thrives in the United States.
Which brings up a recent New York Times report by Emmett Lindner. He writes that “This year, sales on TikTok reached than $10 billion in the United States between January and October, compared with about $5 billion for the same period in 2024.” Stop and think about the numbers you’ve just read.
For one, it’s no reach to imagine that most weren’t even aware that TikTok is quite a bit more than it’s thought to be, including in some ways a look into how people will shop in the future. Retail giant Target opened its doors in 1962, and in 2024 did roughly $100 billion in U.S. sales. Conversely, TikTok began as a social media site in 2016, while TikTok Shop came to be in 2023. Two years later…
It requires a pivot to Amazon. In the same year that TikTok Shop opened its digital doors, the FTC filed an antitrust suit against Amazon for its alleged “monopoly” power over sellers on the site. Except that “Amazon” and “monopoly” over sellers is quickly repudiated by the principal subject of this opinion piece, TikTok and its $10 billion in 2025 sales alone on TikTok Shop.
Which means no more words will be wasted here. Or very few. Just read this opinion piece’s title to grasp the absurdity of the FTC’s attacks on Amazon, along with - yes – the herculean ridiculousness of the “communist” accusations a clueless, but powerful minority still lobs at TikTok.
