Image: Protocol
Trump goes after Tencent, too

Good morning! This Friday, Trump doubles down on ByteDance and Tencent, Wix argues that nobody really understands SaaS, and it looks like everyone's WFH until next July.
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Last night, President Trump put out two executive orders using almost the exact same words. One says that, as of September 20, "any transaction" with ByteDance is prohibited. The second says the same about Tencent, with specific reference to WeChat.
The Tencent order is perhaps the more surprising of the two: After all, the ByteDance one is fairly on-brand given what's happened over the last few weeks. (That said, TikTok has threatened to sue the Trump administration over the order, arguing that the administration has "tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.")
If the Tencent order is actually specific to WeChat — and according to the LA Times, it is — it could be brutal for Chinese companies with an international presence, many of whom use WeChat as a primary communication tool. A ban would be like Slack or Teams suddenly not working outside the U.S.
But if the White House goes after Tencent as a whole? Things are going to get messy:
Either way, investors are very nervous: Tencent shed 10% of its market value, about $45 billion, in trading overnight.
Executive orders haven't always meant much in this administration. Or anything. But as Emily Birnbaum wrote on Protocol, these might actually have some teeth: One odd side effect of this whole story has been that suddenly CFIUS — the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States — is on everyone's mind, because it gives the President a weapon in this fight.
At this point, it seems like pretty much all the cards are on the table, and we'll have to wait and see what happens in September. But, like I seem to say every day at the moment, nothing would shock me.
In other TikTok news: Even Mark Zuckerberg is defending the company. Instagram's TikTok rival, Reels, isn't doing so well, and is so far home to a lot of reposted content from … TikTok. That said, Charli D'Amelio, aka the most popular person on TikTok, tweeted that, "I'm going to start posting on my snapchat story more." And Carol F neatly summed up all the responses to yesterday's question about TikTok (which were surprisingly consistent!): "I am an IT professional and I would never use TikTok or any other form of video like it."
Shakeel Hashim writes: When Wix's stock fell 11% after its earnings report yesterday, CEO Avishai Abrahami was disappointed, but not too concerned. The problem, he said, wasn't with the website-builder company, but with its investors.
"If you don't know Wix well enough, and you don't know SaaS well enough, then it looks like 'Oh my god, they're spending a lot of money,'" Abrahami told Protocol. But he pointed to the 12 month lag between cash collections (when customers pay) and revenues (when that money shows up in the P&L statement) as evidence that there's no need to be concerned.
One thing Wix can't blame investors for: confusion over its web app product which is, in Zohar's words, "unfortunately named Corvid." Abrahami agreed: "We're going to have to do something about that name."
Google did it. Uber did it. Now Facebook's doing it: telling employees that they're not going to have to come back to the office until next July. I suspect more companies, in tech and otherwise, are going to do the same in short order.
Some people will be allowed to go back to the office sooner, in most cases, and some will have to because of their roles. But it's obvious that the pandemic's not going away soon, and that what people really need is flexibility to figure out how their lives work going forward.
By the way, a fun thing to track: How much money each extended-WFH company gives employees to outfit their home office. Is this a new office perk? Or a semi-raise, almost?
Qualtrics' Work Different free virtual event, on August 12, will explore how successful organizations like Atlassian, Microsoft, the NBA, and many others are listening to and taking action on the feedback from their customers and employees to create a "new better" for their business. Register now at Qualtrics.com.
Facebook fundamentally misunderstands the argument about civil rights, Color of Change's Rashad Robinson said:
PayPal wants to be the loyalty card of the future, CFO John Rainey said:
On Protocol: HPE CEO Antonio Neri said the future of the server business is getting closer to the customer:
Aaref Hilaly is heading to Bain Capital Ventures. He was previously a partner at Sequoia, and will help Bain Capital expand its footprint on the West Coast.
Thiago Sa Freire is Chorus.ai's new CRO. He joins from Hudl, and joins Chorus.ai after the company raised $45 million. He'll oversee (and expand) its sales and customer success teams.
Chris Alsup is Dell's new head of North American government affairs. He's been at Dell since 2016, and will be leading the company's government dealings both in the U.S. and Canada.
Dara Treseder is Peloton's new head of marketing and comms. She joins from Carbon, and has done stints at GE and Apple. Karina Kogan also got a promotion, and will run product marketing for the company. I just wonder what they both think of the Peloton Girl ad.
Rob Strayer is now the ITIC's global policy lead. He was formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cyber and International Communications and Information Policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, which is a truly unbelievable job title.
There's a gene in the human genome named MARCH1. Well, there was. Now it's called MARCHF1, for precisely one reason: because Excel rendered MARCH1 as a date, which screwed up all kinds of research. (Up to 20% of studies have been affected by Excel errors!) In fact, 26 other gene identifiers have been changed in the last year for the same reason. It just goes to show: You can change a lot of things, even the human genome, but you better not mess with Excel.
Qualtrics' Work Different free virtual event, on August 12, will explore how successful organizations like Atlassian, Microsoft, the NBA, and many others are listening to and taking action on the feedback from their customers and employees to create a "new better" for their business. Register now at Qualtrics.com.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your weekend, see you Sunday.
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