Tiktok Closes Deal For Us Ownership, Company Says

TikTok has closed a $14 billion deal establishing a U.S. subsidiary of the platform to avoid a ban, the company said Thursday.

The new owners will include the U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake, Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence company MGX and Oracle, a tech giant co-founded by Larry Ellison, an ally of President Donald Trump. They will each hold a 15 percent stake in the U.S. joint venture. The deal allows TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to maintain a nearly 20 percent stake. The Dell Family Office, investment firm of Chair and CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell, is also an investor.

Congress passed a law in April 2024 requiring the sale of TikTok to a U.S. buyer before Jan. 19, 2025, or banning it, citing national security concerns about the app’s ties to China. But Trump delayed the ban from taking effect five times last year while a deal was negotiated to divest the app to American owners. Trump signed an executive order in September approving the deal and giving the parties until Friday to formalize the terms.

The deal matches an internal memo distributed by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew last month, who said the agreement would be finalized by Thursday.

The U.S. version will operate as an independent entity, governed by a seven-member board including TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Oracle Executive Vice President Kenneth Glueck, Timothy Dattels, senior adviser of TPG Global; Mark Dooley, managing director at Susquehanna International Group; Silver Lake Co-CEO Egon Durban, DXC Technology CEO Raul Fernandez; and David Scott, chief strategy and safety officer at MGX.

Adam Presser, head of operations and trust and safety at TikTok, will now serve as CEO of the joint venture.

Trump said in September that Chinese President Xi Jinping had agreed to the deal, but Chinese officials provided an ambiguous narrative, signaling that any deal would be a drawn out process. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the country “respects the wishes of enterprises” and welcomes them to reach “solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and balance interests.”

Trump previously described the deal as a “qualified divestiture,” meaning the sale would fully sever ByteDance’s control over the platform and therefore make TikTok legal under the U.S. law.

China hawks on Capitol Hill have championed this issue over national security concerns and fears that the Chinese-controlled app subjects users to government surveillance and content manipulation. While they’ve vowed to scrutinize the potential deal to ensure it adheres to the law, they seemed prepared to accept Trump’s claim the deal would resolve concerns over national security and control.

Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the U.S. owners would have control over the app’s algorithm, which is at the heart of the platform’s success.

“The U.S. company will have control over how the algorithm pushes content to users and that was a very important part of it,” Vance said during the September executive order signing in the Oval Office. “We thought it was necessary for the national security level element of the law.”

According to the company release, the U.S. version will retrain and update the platform’s algorithm based on U.S. user data. Oracle will control the algorithm within its U.S. cloud environment.

“President Trump got played by Xi Jinping. He got terrible advice from his staff on these negotiations. This isn’t the Art of the Deal, it’s the art of the steal. Xi Jinping can’t believe his luck,” Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the right-leaning Hudson Institute and an expert on U.S.-China policy, told POLITICO.