TikTok's promise of 25,000 new US jobs sets lofty goal

FE Team | Published: September 22, 2020 20:01:46

WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters): Even as dealmakers bicker over who will actually own TikTok Global, another question emerged after President Donald Trump agreed over the weekend to keep the wildly popular video-sharing app running in the United States for another week: how can they possibly create 25,000 new jobs in the United States?
That vow, repeated by the president on Saturday at a campaign rally in North Carolina, was part of a concession that dealmakers offered to convince Trump to green-light a transaction in which a new board comprised of US citizens would oversee a new US-based company and co-owned by Oracle Corp and Walmart Inc.
But the lofty hiring target will be tough to justify, experts said. Such a high number suggests an expectation for massive revenue growth at a time when TikTok faces unprecedented global challenges.
If TikTok operated at anywhere near the efficiency of other internet companies such as Twitter, TikTok would need to generate up to 19 times more revenue over the next few years.
TikTok is expected to generate about a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2020, Reuters previously reported.
Many of the new American jobs will likely be in engineering, content moderation and security roles, given the US government's intense focus on the app's data privacy policies, said Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities.
"From a security and infrastructure perspective, they're going to have to hire a few thousand alone to focus on that issue...given the sensitivity," he said.
TikTok recently announced a $1.0 billion creator fund that will pay popular TikTok influencers for making videos. Counting those content creators would help TikTok reach 25,000 jobs, said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at ad agency GroupM.
Beyond that, it gets harder to justify a bigger staff. Because ByteDance will still own the algorithm that runs TikTok and license it to the new US-based company, the new company will not need to hire large teams that work on artificial intelligence.
Those types of jobs account for a large chunk of Facebook Inc and Twitter's headcount, said Abishur Prakash, a geopolitical futurist at the Centre for Innovating the Future, a technology and geopolitics consulting firm, raising questions about what job roles TikTok could hire for. Oracle and Walmart could also create divisions within their companies to serve TikTok that could contribute to the job count, he added.
A source familiar with the deal discussions said the 25,000-job figure was based on similarly sized organisations that serve as many users as TikTok, without offering details. The source added that the job figure was actually conservative in an effort to under-promise and over-deliver.
Another tech company, Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, promised in 2017 to bring 13,000 new jobs to Wisconsin. The deal to create a new factory in the United States was praised by Trump as the "eighth wonder of the world" and as proof of his ability to bring jobs back to America.