Trump gives TikTok another 75 days

President Donald Trump on Friday said that he signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the U.S. for another 75 days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership.

Congress had mandated that the platform be divested from China by Jan. 19 or barred in the U.S. on national security grounds, but Trump moved unilaterally to extend the deadline to this weekend, as he sought to negotiate an agreement to keep it running. Trump has recently entertained an array of offers from U.S. businesses seeking to buy a share of the popular social media site, but China’s ByteDance, which owns TikTok and its closely-held algorithm, has insisted the platform is not for sale.

TikTok has headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles.

Tariffs rock IPO market

Fintechs Klarna Group Plc and Chime Capital LLC have paused plans for initial public offerings, people with knowledge of the matter said, after the U.S. announced wide-ranging tariffs that sent the stock market into a tailspin.

Ticket platform StubHub Holdings Inc. also delayed its IPO offering, according to the same sources.

Klarna, a digital payments company founded in Stockholm, and New York-based StubHub had filed for IPOs with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March and were gearing up to start marketing their shares to potential investors. The market turbulence has led to the companies holding off their IPO plans, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private.

Klarna aimed to price the IPO in early April, Bloomberg reported in March. It was targeting a valuation of more than $15 billion in the New York Stock Exchange listing.

The Swedish fintech giant is best known for its offering of buy-now, pay-later loans, which typically allow users to make a purchase and split their payments into equal, interest-free installments. Klarna has 93 million active consumers and works with more than 675,000 merchants, according to a March filing.

RealPage sues over rental algorithm ban

Real estate software company RealPage filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against Berkeley — the latest city trying to block landlords from using algorithms when deciding rents. Officials in many cities claim the practice is anti-competitive and is driving up the price of housing.

Texas-based RealPage said Berkeley’s ordinance, which goes into effect this month, violates the company’s free speech rights and is the result of an “intentional campaign of misinformation and often-repeated false claims” about its products.

“Berkeley is trying to enact an ordinance that prohibits speech — speech in the form of advice and recommendations from RealPage to its customers,” RealPage attorney Stephen Weissman told reporters.

The Department of Justice sued Realpage in August under former President Joe Biden, saying its algorithm combines confidential information from each real estate management company in ways that enable landlords to align prices and avoid competition that would otherwise push down rents. That amounts to cartel-like illegal price collusion, prosecutors said. RealPage’s clients include huge landlords who collectively oversee millions of units across the U.S.

Reports compiled from AP and Bloomberg