IT Blog

Teenage fans of the addictive short-form video genre probably have never heard of Ryan Kavanaugh, the onetime Hollywood bad boy now back in the limelight thanks to his ownership of Triller, a video sharing app with a long-shot chance to dethrone TikTok, its more popular rival. The jockeying for young eyeballs between the two companies has mostly taken a backseat to Donald Trump’s lunatic efforts to pry TikTok’s user data from the hands of its Chinese owners. But Kavanaugh is well known around Los Angeles for his own Trumpian exploits—and a similar flair for salesmanship.

“We call ourselves the new MTV,” he says earnestly, when we spoke on a recent autumn afternoon.

Kavanaugh made his name with Relativity Media, the entertainment company he founded in 2004, which claimed to use sophisticated algorithms — the “Monte Carlo method,” in the parlance of Wall Street — to take the risk out of film financing. It was a seductive pitch, and…