By David Shepardson,Jeff Mason
Copyright reuters
SummaryCompaniesByteDance to own less than 20% of TikTok USOracle to store American user data on U.S. cloud infrastructureTrump’s executive order includes 120-day enforcement pause
WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump this week will declare that a deal to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese owner ByteDance will meet requirements set out in a 2024 law, a White House official said on Monday, adding that investors will include Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab and private equity firm Silver Lake.
ByteDance will own less than 20% while TikTok US will be controlled by a mix of its existing U.S. and global firms as well as a significant number of new investors who have no affiliation with ByteDance, the official said. Reuters reported many of the details on Saturday, opens new tab.
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The full slate of investors is not yet finalized. “It’s going to be real household names,” the official added, saying that Trump will sign an executive order certifying that the deal is legal under the law.
The agreement requires that all data on American users will be stored on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure run by Oracle.
Trump said on Sunday that media mogul Lachlan Murdoch and business leaders Larry Ellison and Michael Dell would be involved as U.S. investors in a proposed deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States.
The U.S. is confident that China has approved the deal and does not plan further talks with Beijing about its details, the official told reporters on a conference call, but added that additional paperwork is required from both sides.
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The Chinese embassy in Washington said on Monday it “would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations in keeping with market rules lead to a solution that complies with China’s laws and regulations and takes into account the interests of both sides.”
The official added that the valuation of TikTok’s U.S. assets will be “many billions of dollars.”
The U.S. government will not take a board seat or receive a golden share in the new entity that will own TikTok US. It is unclear if the U.S. government will receive payments as a condition of approval.
Trump is trying to keep the short video app with 170 million U.S. users from being banned after Congress passed a law that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if its U.S. assets were not sold by owner ByteDance.
Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok’s U.S. assets from the global platform, line up American investors and ensure that the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the 2024 law.
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Trump’s executive order will include a new 120-day enforcement pause to allow the investors and ByteDance to close the agreement, the official added.
Last week’s progress toward a deal on TikTok marked a rare breakthrough in months-long talks between the world’s two biggest economies, that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets.
Reporting by Jeff Mason, David Shepardson and Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing Mark Porter, Matthew Lewis and Stephen Coates
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Jeff MasonThomson ReutersJeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in advocating for press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His and the WHCA’s work was recognized with Deutsche Welle’s “Freedom of Speech Award.” Jeff has asked pointed questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA’s “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure” award and co-winner of the Association for Business Journalists’ “Breaking News” award. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a former Fulbright scholar.
