Coatue Founder Laffont Leaves Board of TikTok Parent ByteDance
The Takeaway
Coatue founder Philippe Laffont left the company’s board, and the TikTok owner added French telecom tycoon Xavier Niel as a new director. Coatue is a long time ByteDance investor but recently had been considering selling a portion of its stake.
A spokesperson for Coatue didn’t immediately have a comment.
Coatue Management founder Philippe Laffont has left the board of ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, according to the company’s website. At the same time, ByteDance has added a new director, French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel.
Laffont’s departure follows The Information’s report last week that Coatue was considering selling a portion of its multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance. It isn’t known whether Coatue, a New York investment firm, has sold any shares or why Laffont left the board.
The board shuffle comes a couple of weeks before lawyers representing TikTok, maker of the short-video app, will appear in court to argue against a U.S. law passed earlier this year, requiring TikTok to sever its ties with ByteDance or be banned. TikTok filed a suit in federal court, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. Oral arguments in TikTok’s suit are due in mid-September.
ByteDance has a relatively small board of just five members. Aside from CEO and chair Liang Rubo, others on the board include several representatives of ByteDance shareholders: Susquehanna International Group co-founder Arthur Dantchik, General Atlantic CEO William Ford and HongShan founding partner Neil Shen.
Niel, the new director, doesn’t own any shares in ByteDance, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. He is the founder, majority shareholder and chair of French telecom operator Iliad Group, having worked in the industry since the late 1980s. Iliad is Europe’s fifth-largest mobile and fixed broadband operator by subscribers. Niel is also a shareholder of French newspaper Le Monde and magazine Télérama.
Inside ByteDance, top executives had been discussing adding a new director to diversify its board, which long consisted of major shareholders and ByteDance’s executives, according to a person with knowledge of those discussions. The last change to the board was in late 2021, when ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, who had earlier given up the CEO position, stepped down as chair and left the board.
Given the possibility that TikTok will be banned in the U.S., the importance of maintaining good relations with Europe has increased. It’s possible ByteDance hopes the presence of a French businessperson on its board could help the company’s relations in Europe.
In February last year, TikTok announced Project Clover, a €12 billion investment on European data security spanning the next 10 years. Its e-commerce business, TikTok Shop, has been plotting further expansion in the continent and is preparing to launch its services in Spain and Ireland.
Coatue is a longtime shareholder in ByteDance. In an onstage interview at an The Information event in April, Laffont noted that Coatue has “never had a footprint [in China] that some of these other firms had,” with most of its investments in the U.S. and Western Europe.
He also noted that “for the time being, our investments in China are far less than they used to be in the past.” He noted that “we need to take into account” differences between the two countries. Laffont also joked, “I never thought that the board of ByteDance would be a full-time job.”