By AFP
September 26, 2025
Chinese ownership in TikTok's US market will drop to 20 percent under a new deal announced by President Donald Trump's White House
- Copyright AFP/File Antonin UTZ
Alex PIGMAN and Thomas URBAIN
President Donald Trump insists he has found a solution to keep TikTok alive in the United States through a group of investors who will buy the short-video app from its Chinese owners in accordance with US law.
But questions remain unresolved about how this will play out and what it means for American users.
– Is there actually a deal? –
Any sale of TikTok’s US operations would require Chinese owner ByteDance to divest. That would need approval from China’s government, which is reluctant to see a national champion forced out of its largest market as a trade war rages with an increasingly protectionist Trump.
While the Trump administration has insisted that China has accepted a deal for the sale, there has been no confirmation from Beijing. Queries to TikTok and ByteDance have gone unanswered.
“This deal is still very confusing in terms of what is exactly going on,” University of Florida media professor Andrew Selepak told AFP.
– Is Trump taking over TikTok? –
In an executive order signed on Thursday, the White House outlined a deal centered on key investors with close ties to the president.
Trump has specifically named Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a longtime ally and the world’s second-richest man, as a major player in the arrangement. For decades, Ellison has been one of Silicon Valley’s few high-profile Republicans in a tech sector dominated by liberal politics.
Ellison is returning to the spotlight through his dealings with Trump, who has brought his old friend into major AI partnerships with OpenAI, for example.
The 81-year-old has also backed his son David’s acquisition of Hollywood studio Paramount and is reportedly eyeing Warner Brothers.
The investor group also includes 94-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who control Fox News.
Whether this signals a conservative rebranding of TikTok — a platform Trump credits with helping him reach young voters — remains unclear. Trump denied this possibility on Thursday.
The prospect of a right-wing shift, or increased government intervention in media, has raised concerns that key platforms are falling under conservative control, potentially limiting diverse viewpoints in a bitterly divided America.
The fate of TikTok will be decided amid major shifts across social media platforms.
Elon Musk has transformed X (formerly Twitter) into a vehicle for far-right politics, driving away many establishment media outlets and liberal users.
Meanwhile, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has aligned with Trump and overhauled content moderation on Facebook and Instagram to address Republican claims of anti-conservative bias.
– Why so cheap? –
At Thursday’s White House ceremony, Vice President JD Vance pegged the deal at $14 billion. That’s a surprisingly low figure given Twitter’s $44 billion valuation when it sold and TikTok’s unique reach among young consumers in the world’s largest economy.
Bloomberg reporting helped shed light on the modest price tag: unnamed sources indicated that ByteDance would retain significant value through an expensive licensing arrangement, potentially receiving about half of the new company’s profits even if the company would hold just a 20 percent stake, according to Trump’s plan.
Such terms could trigger alarm in Washington, where some lawmakers could scrutinize whether any sale meets the requirements of the divest-or-ban law that should have taken effect in January but has been repeatedly delayed since Trump took office.
And confusingly, the executive order announced Thursday extended the deadline to ban TikTok until mid-January to finalize a deal that the Trump administration simultaneously claimed was already complete.
John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reiterated this point on Friday and warned that he would be “conducting full oversight over this agreement.”
“ByteDance has shown time and again that it is a bad actor,” he said.
The Trump plan “offers vague assurances about protecting US national security but provides virtually no specifics,” said Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law.
Adding to skepticism: Ellison’s Oracle already manages TikTok’s data servers from an earlier attempt to address US security concerns. Critics question whether this deal changes anything substantive.
Trump allies to control TikTok under new US deal
By AFP
September 25, 2025
Image: — © AFP Richard A. Brooks
Alex PIGMAN
Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order laying out a proposed deal for a US version of TikTok that would see Chinese ownership reduced to 20 percent and put control in the hands of the president’s allies.
At a signing ceremony at the White House, Trump said the US version of the app would be run by “highly sophisticated” investors including Larry Ellison, the founder of cloud giant Oracle, tech investor Michael Dell and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Investment firm Silver Lake Management and Silicon Valley powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz are also thought to be part of the deal.
“The proposed divestiture would allow the millions of Americans who enjoy TikTok every day to continue using it while also protecting national security,” Trump stated in the order, which affects TikTok’s approximately 170 million American users.
The lineup of investors mentioned are all Trump allies but he insisted that the app would not toe any political line.
“If I could make it 100 percent MAGA I would, but it’s not going to work out that way unfortunately. No… every group, every philosophy, every policy, will be treated very fairly,” Trump told reporters.
The president confirmed that the US version of TikTok would feature a homegrown model of the app’s prized algorithm, often described as TikTok’s “secret sauce” that helped it grow into one of the world’s most popular platforms in just a few years.
A White House official said Monday the algorithm would be “continuously monitored” to ensure it is “not being unduly influenced.”
The new set-up for TikTok is in response to a law passed under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, that has forced its Chinese owner ByteDance to sell its US operations or face a ban in its biggest market.
US policymakers, including Trump in his first presidency, have warned that China could use TikTok to mine data from Americans or exert influence through its state-of-the-art algorithm.
Trump has repeatedly delayed enforcement through successive executive orders, most recently extending the deadline until December 16, 2025.
Thursday’s order extended that deadline still further, granting a 120-day enforcement delay to complete the transaction by January 23.
Vice President JD Vance, the one-time venture capitalist who led the team to find a solution for TikTok, said the US entity would be valued at about $14 billion, though he added that it would ultimately be up to the investors to figure out its price.
When asked if the Chinese authorities had signed off on the deal, Trump said that President Xi Jinping gave his green light in a phone call last week.
“(I have) great respect for President Xi, and I very much appreciate that he approved the deal, because to get it done properly, we really needed the support of China,” he said.
TikTok did not respond to a query seeking comment and confirmation, and Beijing has remained largely silent on any deal.
After the Trump-Xi call, state broadcaster CCTV said Xi emphasized to his US counterpart that China supports market-based negotiations that align with Chinese laws.
By AFP
September 25, 2025
Image: — © AFP Richard A. Brooks
Alex PIGMAN
Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order laying out a proposed deal for a US version of TikTok that would see Chinese ownership reduced to 20 percent and put control in the hands of the president’s allies.
At a signing ceremony at the White House, Trump said the US version of the app would be run by “highly sophisticated” investors including Larry Ellison, the founder of cloud giant Oracle, tech investor Michael Dell and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Investment firm Silver Lake Management and Silicon Valley powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz are also thought to be part of the deal.
“The proposed divestiture would allow the millions of Americans who enjoy TikTok every day to continue using it while also protecting national security,” Trump stated in the order, which affects TikTok’s approximately 170 million American users.
The lineup of investors mentioned are all Trump allies but he insisted that the app would not toe any political line.
“If I could make it 100 percent MAGA I would, but it’s not going to work out that way unfortunately. No… every group, every philosophy, every policy, will be treated very fairly,” Trump told reporters.
The president confirmed that the US version of TikTok would feature a homegrown model of the app’s prized algorithm, often described as TikTok’s “secret sauce” that helped it grow into one of the world’s most popular platforms in just a few years.
A White House official said Monday the algorithm would be “continuously monitored” to ensure it is “not being unduly influenced.”
The new set-up for TikTok is in response to a law passed under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, that has forced its Chinese owner ByteDance to sell its US operations or face a ban in its biggest market.
US policymakers, including Trump in his first presidency, have warned that China could use TikTok to mine data from Americans or exert influence through its state-of-the-art algorithm.
Trump has repeatedly delayed enforcement through successive executive orders, most recently extending the deadline until December 16, 2025.
Thursday’s order extended that deadline still further, granting a 120-day enforcement delay to complete the transaction by January 23.
Vice President JD Vance, the one-time venture capitalist who led the team to find a solution for TikTok, said the US entity would be valued at about $14 billion, though he added that it would ultimately be up to the investors to figure out its price.
When asked if the Chinese authorities had signed off on the deal, Trump said that President Xi Jinping gave his green light in a phone call last week.
“(I have) great respect for President Xi, and I very much appreciate that he approved the deal, because to get it done properly, we really needed the support of China,” he said.
TikTok did not respond to a query seeking comment and confirmation, and Beijing has remained largely silent on any deal.
After the Trump-Xi call, state broadcaster CCTV said Xi emphasized to his US counterpart that China supports market-based negotiations that align with Chinese laws.
No comments:
Post a Comment