Topline
The Supreme Court’s signaling it may uphold a ban on TikTok, the wildly popular shortform video social media app, sent shockwaves through the stock market Friday, boosting shares of companies behind rival platforms and hitting hard one key TikTok partner.
Protestors stand outside of the Supreme Court on Friday.
Key Facts
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday in TikTok’s appeal against a law requiring its private Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest its TikTok holdings by or face a U.S. ban Jan. 19, and several justices cast doubt on the legitimacy of TikTok’s argument.
In an otherwise down day for U.S. stocks – the S&P 500 fell more than 1.5% to a two-month low and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 1.6% – two of the biggest stock gainers were a pair of American social media companies behind other short-form video platforms in Snapchat parent Snap, which owns TikTok competitor Spotlight, and Meta, which operates TikTok rival Instagram Reels.
Snap stock gained 4% by close, notching its highest intraday share price since Aug. 1, while shares of the much larger Meta rallied 1%.
Shares of Google parent Alphabet, which owns YouTube Shorts, were less affected by the TikTok hearing, dropping 1.1%, though that was a slimmer loss than the at least 1.4% losses experienced by stocks of Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon, the world’s only other $2 trillion companies.
Big Number
$1.5 billion. That’s how much richer Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg got thanks to Friday’s rally, the biggest daily jump of any American billionaire, according to Forbes’ real-time net worth tracker.
Contra
Friday was a rough day for perhaps TikTok’s most notable American collaborator, software giant Oracle, whose stock tanked 5%, the worst daily loss of any of the U.S.’ 40 mega-cap companies worth at least $200 billion. Shares of Oracle hit their lowest price since early September. Oracle, which hosts the U.S. data of TikTok, cautioned in July its earnings would take a hit if TikTok got banned. Oracle’s cofounder and chairman, Larry Ellison, was the biggest billionaire loser Friday, as his net worth tanked $10 billion.
Tangent
Betting markets have moved heavily in favor of a TikTok ban: The odds of a TikTok ban by May have jumped from 30% to 70% over the last week on the blockchain-based site Polymarket.
Key Background
Meta and Oracle’s opposite fortunes widened the net worth gap between Zuckerberg, the world’s third-richest person, and Ellison, the fourth-wealthiest, to nearly $20 billion, just two days after Zuckerberg’s riches surpassed Ellison’s. ByteDance last fetched a $220 billion valuation in a 2023 funding round and valued itself internally at $300 billion in November, according to Reuters, which would make it the world’s second-most valuable private company, trailing only SpaceX, which valued itself at $350 billion in an internal share sale last month, Bloomberg reported.
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