Wyoming Businessman Not Part of Trump TikTok Cabal

Big Brother Larry Ellison is on the investment team the Mar-a-lago dictatorship has assembled to control TikTok U.S.

Not on the TrumpTok team: Wyoming wheeler-dealer Reid Rasner, who said back in March he’d been in contact with the White House about buying TikTok. In May, Rasner was at Dakota State University telling Governor Larry Rhoden that he could bring TikTok to South Dakota:

Wyoming entrepreneur Reid Rasner, who has made a $47.45 billion bid to buy the social media app TikTok, was in Madison, S.D. at Dakota State University Friday alongside South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden.

“I think what you guys are advancing right here at Dakota State is a perfect match for what we’re looking for, and your research will prove to be very essential to us and our plans moving forward,” Rasner said.

…And if Rasner’s bid is successful, he says South Dakota is more than just a candidate for where TikTok might have a footprint.

“They’re certainly the front-runner for our infrastructure right now, 100%,” Rasner said [Dan Santella, “TikTok Bidder: South Dakota ‘Certainly the Front-Runner,” KELO-TV, 2025.05.23].

Funny, that promise: in June, Rasner told the Wyoming press that he’d bring TikTok to Wyoming:

Throughout his push to buy TikTok, Rasner has maintained he would bring the company to Wyoming.

“Wyoming should be very interested in the advancements of what this next generation of technology is ushering in,” Rasner said. “I believe Wyoming can be at the forefront of all of this.

“I’m from Wyoming and have always championed Wyoming. I hope Wyoming falls into it in a big way.”

A request for comment from Gov. Mark Gordon’s office about the potential for TikTok in Wyoming wasn’t returned by the time this story was posted [Greg Johnson, “Wyoming Entrepreneur in Final Push of $47.45B Bid to But TikTok Before Deadline,” Cowboy State Daily, 2025.06.05].

A couple weeks later, South Dakota Searchlight cast doubt on the depth of Rasner’s pockets:

Excluding the money he loaned himself, Reid Rasner raised less than $35,000 for his failed attempt to unseat a U.S. senator last year.

This year, the 41-year-old Wyoming Republican says he’s assembled more than a million times that amount to buy the social media app TikTok and potentially move its operations to South Dakota.

South Dakotans following the story on his $47.45 billion bid since mid-April, through traditional mediachannels or on social media outlets like Instagram or TikTok, have likely seen the term “billionaire” attached to Rasner’s name.

But his background offers no definitive proof to support that descriptor. Instead, disclosures filed during his Senate campaign show a self-employed financial adviser who owns some real estate, sells used goods on eBay for a sizable portion of his income, and is more than $1 million in debt due to a loan he received from a family trust [John Hult, “Man Who Says He Can Move TikTok to South Dakota Is a Bust in Wyoming Politics,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2025.06.17].

Hult also noted that former U.S. Senate candidate Rasner wasn’t getting as much support from his home-state crowd as he was from Rhoden:

A spokesperson for Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon told South Dakota Searchlight that the governor wants to “respect the president’s deliberative process to procure the organization he feels is best-suited to operate the platform.”

John Bear, a Republican state lawmaker from Gillette and a leader of Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus, said he doesn’t think Rasner’s bid is legitimate.

“It seems to me that this is a publicity stunt, just like his last run for Senate was,” Bear said. “I went and listened to him speak one time, and I didn’t get a feel that he was doing anything other than self-promotion” [Hult, 2025.06.17]

And in July, Rasner backed away from his bid, not because he doesn’t have the money, he assured us, but because China is tricky and social media is mean:

Rasner Media’s website posted a press release Thursday saying the bid’s on pause “unless China makes substantial changes and demonstrates a genuine commitment to a transparent and lawful divestiture.”

The bid to buy TikTok “remains fully funded,” it said.

The press release blamed China for the pause. It said ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, “is attempting to spin off a diluted U.S. version of TikTok” that would keep the app’s core algorithm under Chinese control.

That “likely obfuscates what they have been doing to manipulate and spy on Americans,” Rasner said in the press release.

He’s also blamed a Wyoming state lawmaker for the TikTok deal’s troubles. Rasner filed a defamation lawsuit this week in Laramie County, Wyoming, against former state Sen. Anthony Bouchard for his alleged efforts to “jeopardize a major business acquisition” through disparaging social media posts.

Rasner told the Cowboy State Daily that the language in the lawsuit is a reference to the TikTok bid.

In May 2024, Bouchard took to Facebook to call Rasner a “phony” and accuse him of misconduct during his college days, according to the lawsuit and screenshots provided in a press release from Rasner on the case.

Rasner “has suffered irreparable damage to his personal and professional reputation, which has now been forever diminished and tarnished,” the lawsuit said [John Hult, “Wyoming Financial Planner ‘Pausing’ TikTok Deal He Says Would Benefit South Dakota,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2025.07.11].

Maybe that ongoing defamation case is consuming all of Reid Rasner’s attention and money.

Or maybe Reid Rasner wasn’t full of shit from the get-go. Maybe Reid Rasner is really a good free-marketeer who refused to buy into Trump’s crony-capitalist shakedown:

The Trump administration recently approached a coalition of U.S. investors set to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations with an ask: Will the group make a payment to the federal government “in the low billions,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks.

The response from the investors, which includes tech mogul Larry Ellison, the Murdochs and venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, was an unequivocal yes.

“Not a single member balked,” said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “They see it as something of a finders’ fee.”

Welcome to President Trump’s new business agenda: extracting payments as if the federal government is brokering deals like a white-shoe consulting firm fueled by lucrative “fees for service.”

Whether it’s the U.S. taking 15% of Nvidia and AMD’s chip sales to China, the federal government securing a “golden share” in U.S. Steel or the Trump administration reportedly seeking an equity stake in Lithium Americas as part of a government loan negotiation, the White House is on a campaign of squeezing businesses with few parallels in modern history.

“At a minimum, this now means there is a tax imposed on every major business transaction,” said Luigi Zingales, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago. “But even worse, businesses will no longer be focused on innovating and creating value and instead the whole game now is rent-seeking. It’s all about ingratiating yourself with Trump.”

…”There is no consistent principle at play, just the exercise of Trump’s personal power over other people’s money,” said Dael Norwood, associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, who notes that the winners and losers are clear.

“All Americans — taxpayers, investors, customers, and workers — lose with crony capitalism,” he said. “It increases everyone’s costs, makes everyone more vulnerable to extortion (or worse), and profoundly degrades our expectations for honesty and fair dealing, society-wide” [Bobby Allyn and David Folkenflik, “Trump’s TikTok Deal Payment Criticized as ‘Shakedown Scheme’ by Experts,” NPR, 2025.09.26].

With or without Rasner, in the hands of China, Trump, or Larry Ellison, TikTok remains a lucrative tool in the hands of powerful elites determined to surveil and control the masses for their own power and profit.