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Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel

Editor-in-Chief

Editor-in-Chief

    More From Nilay Patel

    How Meta’s MAGA heel turn is a play for global power

    Law professor Kate Klonick explains what Big Tech’s Trump appeasement is really about.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Trump is absolutely going to make ByteDance sell TikTok or shut down again.

    Here he is talking about it during today’s big data center announcement, with Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, and Masa Son standing in the room with him.

    Extreme First Amendment issues with having the government own a social platform aside, it’s striking how he keeps talking about “permits” even though nothing in the TikTok bill has anything to do with permits. Once a real-estate guy, always a real-estate guy, I suppose.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    The United States Digital Service is now DOGE — here’s what it was responsible for.

    The USDS was set up under Obama, and it was more or less the federal government’s software product management group. I interviewed outgoing head Mina Hsiang on Decoder in 2023, and it was one of our most popular episodes that year — it turns out being the PM of healthcare.gov looks a lot like being the PM of any other software product.

    Trump’s executive order creating DOGE says USDS is now the US DOGE Service, so we’ll see if Elon Musk approaches the government’s tech teams the same way he did Twitter. It’s a lot riskier to screw up the VA website!

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    All those kissy-faces at Trump didn’t get TikTok anything.

    TikTok went hard on Dear Leader flattery with its we’re-banned-we’re-back messaging, but it didn’t even get the full 90-day extension Trump promised — it’s only 75. And Trump loves nothing more than leverage, as he made clear while signing the EO. This thing is getting sold, one way or another.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    TikTok makes more kissy-faces at Trump.

    The app is partially back online in the US with a message explicitly thanking President Trump. The chances that all this desperate messaging backfires and he still forces a sale are steadily rising — that’s what Trump is saying, and the rest of the GOP is insistent that the law be enforced.

    A message attributing TikTok’s return to President Trump.
    Defining “efforts” and “back” in this context is a fun exercise.
    The Verge
    Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI

    AWS chief Matt Garman says Amazon is already seeing the benefits of its massive AI investments.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Trump spoke with TikTok’s CEO after asking the Supreme Court to delay the ban.

    So reports CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. It seems inevitable that Trump will try to broker a sale to a US company and take credit for “saving” TikTok, but the open questions are whether China allows that to happen, and who might be able to afford it.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    The Jets, everyone.

    Here’s why the Jets didn’t trade for star receiver Jerry Jeudy, according to a devastating profile of the team in The Athletic:

    Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources.

    Just a reminder that Aaron Rodgers chose to be traded to this team after, you know, doing his own research.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Emails.

    From Politico:

    Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via email with Donald Trump’s transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.

    Anyway, here’s a secret link to buy our EMAILS shirt, which we first issued after the 2016 election. The connection is left as an exercise for the reader.