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The company’s executives tried to reassure potential advertisers about the app’s future in the United States without directly addressing a looming ban under a federal law.“TikTok is here — we are here,” Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, told a packed warehouse of advertisers on Tuesday in Manhattan.“We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she declared.That statement was the closest TikTok advertising executives got to addressing the app’s uncertain fate in the United States in the company’s annual spring pitch to marketers. Under a federal law and executive order, the app is set to be banned in the country next month if the Chinese owner of the company, ByteDance, does not sell it.Hundreds of representatives from companies like L’Oreal and Unilever and various ad agencies scrambled to find seats for an event hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj that heavily emphasized TikTok’s role as a cultural juggernaut.TikTok was more than a video platform, Mr. Minhaj told the crowd. TikTok was “the cultural moments you talk about at work, the jokes you talk about in your group chat, the language you use in your everyday life,” he said.The tone of the event marked a departure from TikTok’s presentation a year ago, when the company was smarting from the federal law that promised to ban the app in the United States because of national security concerns related to the company’s Chinese ownership. Last year’s pitch started with one of TikTok’s top executives telling roughly 300 attendees that the company would fight the law in court and prevail and was “not backing down.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For a few weeks last fall, I was eating a deflated rectangle made of cottage cheese, eggs and shredded Cheddar every day for lunch. When this unholy concoction first came out of the oven, it would seem so fluffy and filled with promise; warm and buttery yellow. By the time this egg bake made it to my plate, it fell into a sad lump. It always tasted fine; I’ve had much worse. But it’s certainly not what I would have chosen to eat regularly if I had not listened to the siren song of #proteinfluencers.Protein has been the hot macronutrient for a while now. Longtime readers may recall that I gently mocked my husband for his protein obsession back in 2023. He had been listening to health podcasts and social media posts, and various protein powders made their way into our pantry. In the two years since I wrote that piece, protein has become even more ubiquitous. This month, The Wall Street Journal noted that “In the year to Feb. 22, the fastest-growing grocery items were those with the most protein per serving — 25 grams or more, according to NielsenIQ data.” The extended Kardashian clan, who never met a trend they couldn’t capitalize on, is in the mix. Khloe Kardashian just announced a new line of protein popcorn called Khloud.Protein-forward diets are easy to market because they appeal to both men and women. Dieting in general is female coded, but men can focus on protein without feeling emasculated because body builders do it, and it comes in the form of literal red meat (hello beef tallow, my old friend) and gym-rat powders.In general, I try to eat in a way that makes me feel physically and mentally good. I thought that I had grown beyond fads and that I could not be swayed. I try to resist outside influences because I was raised on a steady diet of teen magazines and “America’s Next Top Model” and the fiction that celery is a negative calorie food. I don’t need to flood my brain with any more self-loathing nonsense.Still, I don’t want to be ignorant of ways to keep myself fully functional. I turned 43 this year. I’m competitive about my athletic prowess. I’m trying to get my fastest mile run under 7 minutes. I have been reading about how muscle mass starts to decline in your 30s — especially for women — and consuming enough protein is essential for building new muscle.I’m also not immune to social media, in part because it’s my job to analyze what is popular and how trends are sold to a captive audience. But I am also part of the audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The Trump administration’s plan to add steep fees to packages from China will deal a blow to Temu, Shein and some TikTok Shop sellers, worrying American consumers.Tamika Johnson, a 44-year-old in Chicago, posted videos to TikTok this month about her orders from Shein, the Chinese e-commerce giant. She was nervous about potential delivery delays in the face of upcoming tariffs.Her 213,000 followers chimed in as she shared status updates on her purchases of clothing and suitcases, detailing their own plans for last-minute orders and sharing concerns about their shipments.“People are very worried,” Ms. Johnson, who posts to TikTok under the handle @TammyTheBlackPrepper, said in an interview. “I’m trying to stock up on clothes now and the things that I need.”Ms. Johnson is one of many American consumers who have been posting anxiously to TikTok and Reddit about a coming Trump administration-induced change for the Chinese e-commerce companies Shein and Temu, which sell inexpensive items like $8 dresses and $14 wagons. Starting on May 2, the Trump administration is poised to end a trade loophole that enabled the delivery of ultra low-cost goods from Chinese factories straight to Americans’ doorsteps without being subject to duties. That will add steep new fees to packages from Shein and Temu.At least some sellers on TikTok Shop, the popular app’s growing marketplace, and AliExpress, another Chinese e-commerce site, will also take a hit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a proposal that could secure TikTok’s future in the United States, two people familiar with the plans said.Mr. Trump will consider a proposal for a new ownership structure for the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Lawmakers and other U.S. officials have argued that the app’s ties to China raise national security concerns, and a federal law that was passed last year requires TikTok to change its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The latest deadline for that ban is Saturday.The meeting is set to include Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to find an arrangement to save the popular app early in February, and other top officials, the two people said on the condition of anonymity. The new ownership structure, they said, could include Blackstone, the private equity giant, and Oracle, the technology company.The meeting is another twist in the long national saga of TikTok, which surged in popularity in the United States despite sustained and deep scrutiny in Washington and state capitals. Mr. Trump, who made repeated assurances that he wants to save the app, extended the deadline for a deal in January and suggested that he might do so again if a suitable plan was not reached by early this month.TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment.It is not clear that the kind of deal under discussion would comply with the law, which calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or companies in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China.The law also bars a new entity from working with ByteDance to operate its video-recommendation technology or creating a data-sharing agreement.Mr. Trump suggested last week that he might relax upcoming tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s support of a deal.TikTok has maintained that it is not for sale, in part, it says, because the Chinese government would block a deal. More
Down-ballot races in Florida and Wisconsin are seen as a referendum on the White House, while the president’s to-be-announced reciprocal tariff plan is increasingly worrying investors and consumers.President Trump’s political momentum will face a major test this week as Democrats try to turn various down-ballot races into a referendum on the White House, and Mr. Trump’s long-promised tariffs risk rattling allies and consumers alike.A State Supreme Court election in Wisconsin on Tuesday is seen as an indicator of support for Mr. Trump, particularly after Elon Musk and groups he funds spent more than $20 million to bolster Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate. White House officials have also been increasingly concerned with the unusually competitive race on Tuesday for a deep-red House seat in Florida left vacant after Representative Michael Waltz stepped down to serve as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.The White House is hoping victories in those races will tighten Mr. Trump’s grip on the Republican Party as his team seeks to overcome the backlash from its inadvertent sharing of military plans on a commercial app with a journalist.The Florida election is critical for Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the House as they try to pass the president’s agenda. The outcome of the Wisconsin race, in a battleground state that Mr. Trump narrowly won last year, could be a reflection of voters’ views on the president’s gutting of the federal work force, his crackdown on illegal immigration and his moves to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.“It’s a big race,” Mr. Trump said of the Wisconsin judicial contest on Monday while signing executive orders in the Oval Office. “Wisconsin is a big state politically, and the Supreme Court has a lot to do with elections in Wisconsin.”Mr. Trump is also expected to reveal the details of his reciprocal tariff plan on Wednesday. He has labeled it “Liberation Day,” saying the nation will finally break free of past trade relationships that he argues have cheated the United States. Investors, however, are growing more concerned that the tariffs could fuel inflation and slow consumer spending, potentially driving up economic anxieties among voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
President Trump on Wednesday raised the possibility that he could relax steep upcoming tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s support on a deal to sell TikTok to a new owner supported by the United States.Acknowledging that Beijing is “going to have to play a role” in any transaction, Mr. Trump signaled to reporters at the White House that he could be open to negotiation. “Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he said.Under a law enacted before Mr. Trump took office, the Chinese-based parent company of TikTok must either sell the social media app’s U.S. operations or face what essentially amounts to a domestic ban. Lawmakers adopted that policy in response to growing, bipartisan concerns that the app posed threats to U.S. national security, which TikTok denies.Congress originally set a January deadline for its ultimatum. But no sale occurred, prompting Mr. Trump — as one of his first executive actions — to delay enforcement of the law for 75 days in the hopes of securing a buyer.The new deadline arrives on April 5, just three days after Mr. Trump separately plans to announce what he has described as “reciprocal” tariffs, imposing new duties on foreign nations based on the trade barriers that they erect to U.S. imports. The president has already subjected Chinese goods to a 20 percent tariff, on top of those he enacted during his first term in office.“Every point in tariffs is worth more than TikTok,” Mr. Trump said about the prospects of a negotiation, adding: “Sounds like something I’d do.”Mr. Trump on Wednesday said he could issue another order that grants the government additional time to find a buyer for TikTok, stressing the goal is an outcome “that’s best for our country.” The president has raised the possibility that the U.S. government could acquire a stake in the app.”If it’s not finished, it’s not a big deal. We’ll extend it,” Mr. Trump said.Chinese officials, for their part, maintain that any sale or divestiture must comply with local export laws, potentially giving Beijing power over any arrangement brokered by Mr. Trump. More
We cover a surprising form of Gen Z burnout. Consider yourself lucky if you have never heard of the “coastal grandmother aesthetic.”Or “blueberry milk nails,” or the “mob wife aesthetic” or a hundred other blink-and-you’ll-miss-them crazes that cycle online with the ferocity of a centrifuge. These microtrends, as they’re known, tend to be associated with Gen Z. But members of that generation say they are exhausted by the onslaught of faddish clothes and new phrases they encounter every time they pick up their phones.I’ve spent the last few months asking young people about the fashion and social media trends that are actually registering in their offline lives. More than any one trend, the teenagers and twentysomethings I spoke with wanted to talk about just how many trends there were, and how overwhelming it all felt.Every generation feels pressure to keep up with trends, especially in its youth. But many members of Gen Z seem to be under particular stress: The fire hose of social media offers endless opportunities to feel left out. Others say they just can’t afford — mentally or financially — to try to keep up.For a new story in The Times’s Style section, I talked to young people about the frenzied trend ecosystem — and what some of them were doing to escape it.Keeping upShort-form video platforms like TikTok are fertile territory for microtrends. They get a heavy assist from fast fashion companies like Temu and Shein that sell inexpensive but poorly made clothes and accessories, available in just a few clicks on the apps.On the first day of sixth grade, Neena Atkins noticed that several girls at her middle school wore scrunchies on their wrists. She searched for scrunchies on TikTok, and in the days that followed she was served dozens more videos in which the hair ties were being worn as bracelets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
