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Greetings! When future historians chronicle recent events in the tech industry, they're likely to marvel at the endurance of TikTok, which has become like a cockroach in a nuclear war: the ultimate survivor. Today's Supreme Court decision upholding the ban-or-sell law should have been the nail in the coffin for the company. After all, as we recounted in this piece today, its management had no backup plan other than the legal fight it just lost. ByteDance does not seem to have ever seriously entertained the idea of selling TikTok. Its lack of a Plan B seemed to be reflected in the fact that it took TikTok two and a half hours to respond publicly to today's widely expected court decision. (You'd think having a statement ready to go would have been an obvious notion.) And yet, TikTok cannot be counted out. Incoming President Donald Trump's camp has signaled he will find a way to keep the app alive. Understandably, when TikTok's response to the court decision finally came, it was in the form of a video from CEO Shou Zi Chew professing his thanks to Trump. The fact that the president who started the push to ban TikTok in 2020 is now the app's only hope of survival under its current ownership has to be one of the great ironies of recent years in tech. It's a reminder of how mending relations with the Trump camp, as TikTok did so memorably, can save a company's bacon in the Trump era. Who can be surprised, then, at moves other tech companies have made to curry favor with Trump? The continuing TikTok drama is just one piece of what's likely to be an action-packed few weeks. Trump's inauguration on Monday is expected to kick off regulatory changes that investors and companies should relish, in areas like crypto and possibly antitrust governance. Next week also sees the start of tech earnings season: Netflix reports December-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Apple and Microsoft follow the week after and Google comes in early February. For all this and more, stay tuned! In other U.S.-China tech rivalry news, President Joe Biden's administration took a key step on Friday toward restricting a loophole e-commerce companies including Temu, Amazon and Shein have been using to ship packages directly to U.S. shoppers from China without paying tariffs. I won't bore you with the administrative details—more on that here—but the move essentially clears the way for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bar companies from dodging tariffs on individual orders of many kinds of goods worth less than $800, including apparel, following a 60-day public comment period that began Friday. As with the TikTok law, the big question now is whether Trump will choose to break from Biden by reversing the move once he takes office. That would be much easier to do in this case, since the measure is based on an executive action rather than a law passed by Congress. I expect Trump is likely to view the issue as a useful bargaining chip in broader negotiations with China.—Theo Wayt TikTok dominated the week in tech news, not surprisingly, culminating with Friday's Supreme Court decision. We explained in this piece how TikTok had no backup plan to its legal fight. Earlier, we broke the news that TikTok staffers were planning to shut down the app on Sunday in accord with the ban, and that the flood of TikTok users to China's RedNote app was causing problems with China's internet watchdog. Kaya and our ad reporter, Cathy Perloff, delved into how advertisers were reacting to the uncertainty and what could happen next. And we assessed the winners and losers of a TikTok ban. TikTok's future is a big deal for creators. On that front, this piece assesses the 2024 report card for creator economy funding. In this True Value, Anita Ramaswamy explains why Block's stock has stalled. Aaron Holmes looked at whether Activision Blizzard has done much for Microsoft's gaming business. (Spoiler alert: The answer is no.) On the finance front, Cory Weinberg revealed new numbers on Anduril's business and its plans for an employee stock sale. Cory and Natasha Mascarenhas broke the news that Palantir was in talks to invest in Shield AI, a maker of drones. And Yueqi Yang looked at the small U.S. banks that have been expanding into offering services to crypto firms, which could become a growth area as crypto regulation relaxes under Trump. On the consumer product front, Ann Gehan attended a major retail conference in Florida and filed this report on expectations for dealmaking among investors and executives in that sector. Meta's plans for a new round of layoffs, aimed at weak performers, kept the Facebook owner in the news. We also broke news of what Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told staff about how the company had mishandled certain aspects of rolling out its recent content moderation and human resources changes. On the Nvidia front, Qianer Liu and Anissa Gardizy revealed that some of the chip designer's biggest customers are facing new delays in getting its most advanced AI chips up and running in their data centers. • The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it had referred a legal complaint it made against Snap to the Department of Justice. The FTC alleged that the company's artificial intelligence chatbot poses "risks and harms to young users of the application" and that Snap "is violating or is about to violate the law." • Crypto wallet provider Phantom said it raised $150 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm that boosted its valuation to $3 billion. 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