TikTok holds its End Of Year Event 2022 in Milan, Italy, on Dec. 13.
Claudio Lavenia | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
TikTok is beginning to feel the sting of political and regulatory pressure in Europe, where the Chinese-owned app has largely evaded the scrutiny it’s faced in the U.S.
EU Commissioner of the Internal Market Thierry Breton warned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a meeting this month the bloc could ban the app if it didn’t comply with new rules on digital content well ahead of a Sep. 1 deadline.
That’s a marked shift from the EU’s near silence on TikTok, while U.S. lawmakers have been aggressive — banning the app from federal devices in December over national security concerns. A proposed bipartisan bill also seeks to block the app from operating in the U.S.
The difference with TikTok is that the app has kept out of the crosshairs of commercial interests in Europe.
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“There is no political demand for investigation into Chinese entities,” Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, the director of think tank the European Centre for International Political Economy, said in an interview in December.
“The user base of TikTok is a lot bigger than a lot of people in Europe think,” he said. But, he added, “you’re not going to look very closely if they don’t steal too much from your ad revenue.”
TikTok had about 275 million monthly active users in Europe as of December, according to Sensor Tower’s Abe Yousef, noting that’s more than one third of Europe’s population of about 750 million.
The data dragon TikTok must be placed under the surveillance of the European authorities. Europe must finally wake up.
Moritz Korner
MEP, European Parliament
TikTok was the most-downloaded social media app last year in Italy and Spain, according to data.ai, formerly called App Annie. The app held second place in France and Germany, the data showed.
WhatsApp, owned by Facebook parent Meta, ranked first among social media app downloads in France and Germany, and third in Italy and Spain, according to data.ai.
Meta reported $29.06 billion in European revenue in 2021, a region the company defined as including Russia and Turkey. In contrast, TikTok recorded turnover of just $531 million in the European Union in 2021, according to the latest available filing in the U.K. But that was well over four times what was disclosed for 2020.
“It takes a little bit of time for the European Commission to get its act together on these issues,” said Dexter Thillien, lead tech and telecoms analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit.
“It’s not because of a lack of willingness from the European Commission to do something,” Thillien told CNBC in a phone interview. “They’ve got their hands full with bigger companies.”
TikTok isn’t yet a behemoth at the scale of companies like Meta, Alphabet and Amazon when it comes to social media, advertising and e-commerce. But TikTok has become so popular that its app has inspired copycat products, such as Meta’s Reels short video feature.
More than half of people aged 16 to 24 in France and Germany use TikTok, according to data.ai.
Since its launch in 2016, TikTok has amassed a worldwide monthly user base of more than 1 billion, and cemented the careers of well-known media personalities, from the D’Amelio sisters to Addison Rae.
That gives it an attractive pool of data to train its algorithms to target users aggressively with content most aligned with their interests. TikTok’s parent, Beijing-based ByteDance, has found similar success in China with a local version of the app, called Douyin.
A big fear among U.S. intelligence officials — and increasingly lawmakers in Europe, as well — is that Beijing could influence how TikTok targets its users to engage in propaganda or censorship.
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“TikTok’s success is the result of a European policy failure,” Moritz Korner, a member of the European Parliament for Germany’s Free Democratic Party, told CNBC via email.
“From a geopolitical perspective, the EU’s inactivity towards TikTok has been naive.”
Korner has been calling on the European Commission to pressure data protection authorities into taking action against TikTok since 2019. He is worried the platform poses “several unacceptable risks for European users,” including “data access by Chinese authorities, censorship, [and] tracking of journalists.”
“The data dragon TikTok must be placed under the surveillance of the European authorities,” said Korner. “Europe must finally wake up.”
Why Europe’s tone is changing
Last month, ByteDance admitted to using two journalists’ TikTok data to locate their physical movements, according to a widely-reported internal memo. Surveillance concerns, in addition to the EU’s tough Digital Services Act, were a big topic of conversation in Chew’s meetings with EU officials earlier this month.
The DSA, which was approved last year, is yet to be applied in Europe. EU officials are pressuring tech giants of all stripes to get their houses in order before a Sep. 1 deadline, including TikTok.
“The EU takes privacy and data protection issues very seriously. And it is building one of the most rigorous regulatory architectures for digital platforms, including TikTok, in the world,” Manuel Muniz, provost at IE University, told CNBC.
Under Chinese counter-espionage and national security rules, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and other Chinese tech firms would be forced to share user data with Beijing if asked to by the government, experts previously told CNBC.
This was a concern back when the U.S. was pressuring allies to ban Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, in 2019. Addressing the National Intelligence Law in a 2019 press conference, a Chinese government spokesperson said intelligence work should be done “according to law” and urged people to “not take anything out of context.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok has admitted that data on its European users can be accessed by employees based in China, but denies it would ever share such information with the Chinese government.
The firm nonetheless says it is committed to creating a robust system for processing the data of Europeans within Europe.
That reflects a major difference: European regulators have focused on data processing, while U.S. regulators look for national security threats.
Meanwhile, investigations into TikTok’s accessing of users’ data in China are “starting to bear fruit,” according to Thillien.
Investigations take time. The Irish Data Protection Commission took nearly five years to end its probe into Meta’s targeted advertising practices, which resulted in a fine of more than $400 million.
The commission is examining whether the transfer of user data from TikTok to China and processing of data on minors is in breach of the bloc’s strict GDPR privacy rules. An outcome in the Irish privacy probe isn’t expected until late this year or 2024.
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.
That hasn’t happened yet.
What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”
Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.
Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.
But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.
Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.
FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”
The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.
The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.
The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.
Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.
Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.
Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.
Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.
On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.
To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.
Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”
Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.
Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.
Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.
Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.
There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.
It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”
Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.
More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.
It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.
Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.
Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.
Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.
OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.
Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”
“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.
Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.
“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”