Less than two years ago, TikTok was a crisis situation on Capitol Hill. The chair of the House Select Committee on China called it “digital fentanyl” that brainwashes young Americans into supporting Hamas. A former national security adviser said letting TikTok remain in the US under its Chinese owner “would be akin to allowing Soviet control of several major American newspapers and TV channels during the Cold War.” Lawmakers left classified national security briefings about TikTok sharing grave concerns. All of it culminated in the surprise frenzy of a bipartisan bill forcing Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban, which swiftly became law.
But nearly a year after the app should have been kicked out of the US, TikTok remains widely available, thanks to intervention from the administration of President Donald Trump. A promised acquisition by US investors, brokered through Trump, has been stalled for months. And the lawmakers who passed the ban are largely staying quiet.
For most of his career Larry Ellison has been content to quietly let Oracle be the company, behind the company, behind the technology that makes headlines. Its biggest products being cloud computing and database products that it sells to enterprise customers like DHL, Northwell Health, and Fanatics. But, now in his 80s, Ellison has begun a second act shifting from Silicon Valley pioneer, to media mogul.
Compared to many of the other people at the top of the Forbes Billionaires list, Larry Ellison tends to keep a low profile. That’s not to say he hasn’t seen his fair share of headlines, especially in recent years. But he, and his company Oracle, aren’t being routinely dragged in front of congress for high profile shouting matches, or being accused of ruining an entire generation of children in op-ed pages.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order recognizing the framework of a deal between ByteDance and the US that would satisfy the TikTok divest-or-ban law. The deal values TikTok’s US operations at $14 billion and puts it under the control of companies based in the US.
“I spoke with President Xi [Jinping], we had a good talk,” Trump said during a briefing. “I told him what we were doing, and he said, ‘Go ahead with it.’”
A 10 percent stake in Intel, 15 percent of Nvidia’s China sales, a “golden share” of Nippon Steel — what price will Trump extract next in exchange for favorable treatment? Well, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump Administration is “expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee” in exchange for negotiating a US takeover of TikTok’s US business.
That fee will reportedly come from TikTok’s US investors, including private equity firm Silver Lake and Oracle, with the new group getting half of TikTok, while TikTok China’s parent company ByteDance would still have under 20 percent.
China and the US have “made progress” on granting permission for ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American consortium, fulfilling a nine-months-overdue legal requirement. After saying a tentative deal had been reached Monday and that approval would come Friday, President Donald Trump’s administration has issued an update that leaves the current status ambiguous and the details bare-bones.
“I just completed a very productive call with President Xi of China. We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal,” Trump posted on Truth Social, noting he and Xi Jinping would meet at the APEC Summit in Korea in October. “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!”
TikTok might not finalize its deal to sell its US operations for at least another month. Sources tell CNBC’s David Faber that the US and China might close on an agreement within the next 30 to 45 days, while Oracle will remain the app’s cloud partner, allowing it to continue routing US user data on American servers.
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that the US and China have reached a “framework deal” for TikTok. He added that President Donald Trump would confirm the deal on Friday — two days after TikTok’s latest deadline to divest expires. Trump has already given TikTok three extensions to negotiate a deal, and it’s unclear whether he’ll grant TikTok another while the company finalizes an agreement.
Even with the TikTok divest-or-ban law officially in effect since January, the app has only shut down service in the US for one day. Now, The Information reports that an agreement for a sale satisfying the law’s requirements is close and would come with a new, separate version of the app.
Any deal, however, would need approval from the Chinese government, which is also still wrangling with the Trump administration over tariffs.
For the third time, President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok to spin out from its Chinese parent company or face a US ban. As White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a statement Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday extending the deadline another 90 days, landing the new deadline in mid-September.
The Trump administration will spend the next 90 days “working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” Leavitt said.
Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.
As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok.
President Donald Trump’s additional 75 day delay to TikTok’s sale-or-ban deadline leaves service providers like Apple, Google, and Oracle on shaky ground, and, according to one influential Democrat, is straight-up “against the law.”
After Trump announced the extension on Friday, 12 Republican members of the House Select Committee on China, including Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), released a joint statement in response. The statement did not address legal concerns with the second extension, but it said that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.” The letter says signatories “look forward to more details” on a proposed deal.
Donald Trump’s initial 75-day delay against enforcement of the TikTok ban law would’ve expired this weekend, but on Friday, he announced on Truth Social that “I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”
This week, Trump announced new taxes on products coming into the US, including a 34 percent tariff rate against China. He has said that he would consider lowering that rate in exchange for China agreeing to a TikTok deal, but with the deadline closing in, it’s Trump who decided to extend the delay instead of having TikTok’s app shut down again.
After President Donald Trump pushed back a deadline for banning TikTok in January, the 75-day delay will run out on April 5th, but there’s still no word on a deal that could satisfy the law by shifting control of TikTok away from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
The Information reports that later today, Trump plans to announce a plan for “TikTok America,” a new company with 50 percent ownership by unnamed new US investors, a one-third stake for existing ByteDance investors, and a 19.9 percent share for ByteDance. It would apparently license TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance.
