President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring his plan to sell TikTok’s US operations to American and global investors will satisfy national security requirements under a 2024 law that threatened to ban the Chinese-owned app.
The restructuring values TikTok’s US assets at $14 billion and involves Oracle, Silver Lake and other investors taking roughly 50 per cent ownership of the new American entity, reports Reuters.
Vice President JD Vance explained the administration wanted to maintain TikTok’s operations while protecting American data privacy as required by law, despite initial resistance from China. Trump confirmed Chinese President Xi Jinping had approved the arrangement after direct discussions between the leaders.
“This is going to be American-operated all the way,” Trump said, naming Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman emeritus of Fox News owner Fox Corp and newspaper publisher News Corp, among the investors.
The deal requires ByteDance to retain less than 20 per cent ownership and appoint just one of seven board members for the new US company. The algorithm will be retrained and monitored by American security partners, with operational control transferred to the joint venture.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance currently values itself at more than $330 billion, making the $14 billion US valuation significantly below some analyst estimates of $30-40 billion for the American operations alone.
The agreement aims to extract TikTok’s 170 million US users from Chinese oversight whilst maintaining the platform’s functionality, though Republican lawmakers demanded additional details to ensure complete separation from Chinese Communist Party influence.
