TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US business to three American investors – Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX – ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.
The deal is expected to close on 22 January, according to an internal memo seen by he Associated Press and Reuters. The TikTok chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, said in the memo that ByteDance and TikTok have signed binding agreements with the three investors.
The new TikTok US joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX with 15% each. Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, according to the memo.
White House officials have said Oracle, which was co-founded by Donald Trump’s supporter Larry Ellison, will license a copy of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as part of the deal, in a partnership that will expand on Oracle’s existing management of TikTok’s trove of data collected about its US users.
Ellison’s role in the new ownership of the most popular social media platform in the US has raised concerns about the decreasing share of media firms not under the control of pro-Trump billionaires, with Ellison’s son David now driving wholesale changes at CBS, Elon Musk in control of X, formerly known as Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg overseeing both Instagram and Facebook, and Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post.
“First Paramount/CBS and now TikTok,” Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, wrote on Bluesky in response to the news. “Trump wants to hand over even more control of what you watch to his billionaire buddies. Americans deserve to know if the president struck another backdoor deal for this billionaire takeover of TikTok.”
Rush Doshi, who coordinated US government policy on China and Taiwan as a Biden National Security Council official, noted that there were “still some questions about who controls the algorithm. They say it will be trained on US data. Great, but has the algorithm been transferred, licensed, or is it still owned and controlled by Beijing – with Oracle merely providing ‘monitoring?’”
The agreement comes after a long delay. Trump said in September that he had spoken with China’s president over the phone about the deal and he had “a very good talk with president Xi” and “he gave us the go ahead”.
In October, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, announced that the US and China had “reached a final deal on TikTok”.
In 2020, during his first presidency, Trump had threatened to ban TikTok in retaliation for China’s handling of Covid.
Congress later passed a ban of the app over security concerns that was signed into law in April 2024 by Joe Biden. The ban was set to go into effect on 20 January 2025 but implementation was pushed back multiple times by Trump while his administration worked to develop a deal to transfer ownership.
