President Donald Trump signed an executive order today, sealing the deal that will keep the app in the U.S.
Though there will still be some regulatory hurdles to jump, it appears that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Trump are both on board to separate the app from its Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd. As reported earlier this week, U.S. investors will own 80% of the app, while ByteDance will own 20%. The transfer should be completed early next year.
“I had a very good talk with President Xi,” Trump said today, referring to a phone call between the two men. “And we talked about TikTok and other things, but we talked about TikTok and he gave us the go-ahead,” he added.
The deal constitutes a qualified divestiture in line with a ban or sell law that was passed last year with the backing of both Democrats and Republicans after years of scrutiny over TikTok’s potential to undermine U.S. national security or enhance the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to propagandize a very large audience.
It’s believed the app has about 170 million users in the U.S. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center revealed that 20% of U.S. social media users got their daily news from TikTok – up from just 3% in 2020.
Trump had attempted to ban TikTok in his first term, signing an executive order in 2020 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that stated that unless the app was sold off to a non-Chinese company, it would no longer be available to its U.S. audience. This was later blocked by a court injunction.
The Biden administration reversed the ban and, in 2024, introduced legislation giving the app six months to divest or face losing its U.S. presence. Back in power, Trump seemed to take a more lenient view and delayed the ban.
Oracle Corp. will take care of security and “monitor and assure the safety of all operations in the U.S.” This will mean having control over the code and TikTok’s controversial algorithm, which will now be retrained and monitored to ensure content is free from “improper manipulation.”
“The divestiture prohibits the storage of sensitive U.S. user data in a manner that would allow such data to be under the control of a foreign adversary,” states the order. “All U.S. user data will be stored in a trusted, secure, and purpose-built cloud environment in the United States run by Oracle.”
A ban would have made whoever was in power very unpopular. The executive order today reminds Americans that the small and large businesses that rely on TikTok are now safe. The White House said the deal will drive economic growth, generating an estimated $178 billion in economic activity in the U.S. over the next four years.
Though keeping the app in the U.S. under U.S. control will certainly please much of the public and politicians alike, there have already been concerns that its new owners will be perhaps overly MAGA-friendly. When Trump was asked this earlier at the press conference, he replied, “I always like Maga-related. If I could, I’d make it 100% Maga-related,” but said that the app will be nonpartisan, explaining, “Everyone is going to be treated fairly, every group, every philosophy.”
Trump may relish the PR boon of getting the deal done. At the conference, he reminded his audience that “the young people” of the U.S. have been gunning for him to “save TikTok.” He invoked the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk for persuading him to sign up to the platform. “Charlie helped me a lot, too. He said, ‘You should go on TikTok,’” Trump said.
Who exactly will be at the helm will be announced later this week, although the new owners, along with Oracle Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, are expected to be private equity firm Silver Lake and Dell Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Michael Dell, and possibly Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch of Fox Corp. The billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen may also fill the list.
Vice President JD Vance had said Thursday that the new U.S.-based joint venture will carry an estimated value of about $14 billion. TikTok’s U.S. operations had previously been valued much higher – between $20 billion and $100 billion – depending on whether the deal included access to its core recommendation algorithm.