Donald Trump may have gotten played for a "sucker" by a billionaire donor who's trying to save his stake in the TikTok social media company, according to a journalist.
Billionaire investor Jeff Yass and his privately held Susquehanna International Group hold a 15-percent stake in TikTok's parent company ByteDance, but president Joe Biden signed a law last month that would force the company to sell off the social media platform to an American owner or get banned from the U.S. market – so he's turning to Trump for help.
"Jeff Yass is a based in Pennsylvania, and he's the largest single political donor this cycle, has yet to donate to Trump's campaign," Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "What does Jeff Yass own? His firm is the single largest American investor in TikTok, so connect the dots. Donald Trump flips his position, throws his weight behind this investment, perhaps seeking to get a donation. This boils down to a very simple thing: Donald Trump looks at politics through the prism [of] what helps Donald Trump. It's not about ideology, it's not about policy. It is about what advances his own personal and financial agenda."
Trump had tried to ban TikTok himself as president in August 2020 but reversed his position after meeting in March at Mar-a-Lago with Yass, who himself reversed his position on the former president – whom he personally cautioned against running for re-election, and the investor showered millions of his own money on Republican primary challengers.
"This is what's fascinating," Sherman said. "Jeff Yass came up through the world of professional gambling, that's kind of his framework for investing, and in gambling you always try to play the sucker, right? So Jeff Yass has gotten Donald Trump to flip his position on TikTok to support his investment without having to donate to the campaign. I mean, who's the sucker here?"
Susquehenna, however, holds the largest institutional investment in Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which recently merged with the former president's foundering social media company, although the firm issued a statement denying its stake was motivated by politics, but Sherman said Yass was gambling on Trump's desperation for campaign cash to save his position on TikTok.
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"He's not given, and as I reported in my piece, his team says he doesn't plan to give," Sherman said. "He has all the leverage over Donald Trump. He's dangling his money to get Trump to flip on TikTok."
Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski laughed incredulously, pointing to Trump's self-mythologizing book that presents him as a master businessman.
"'Art of the Deal,'" Scarborough said, laughing.
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