OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the Relentless podcast that he forced himself to get “addicted” to TikTok to study its mechanics, only to delete the app after finding it “too powerful” to control. He described the experience as similar to a drug, saying he was “really enjoying it in the moment” but knew the habit was bad for him. Altman said he initially used it for 10 minutes before bed, then it became an hour one night and three hours on a Saturday afternoon. After briefly scaling usage down to five or 10 minutes a night, he decided to delete the app entirely. Separately, TikTok’s US operations are now owned by a majority-investor entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which includes Larry Ellison’s Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, while ByteDance retains a minority 19.9% share in the US venture. Altman’s TikTok deep dive coincided with OpenAI’s internal efforts to build its own AI-generated video social media platform, Sora. Despite generating massive hype and securing a partnership with Disney, OpenAI officially scrapped the Sora app project in March after six months of development, as executives determined that rendering video consumed too much computing power at a time when resources were better spent competing with rivals like Anthropic.