After more than a year of high-stakes, globe-spanning negotiations, the long and tortured saga of TikTok’s American future is finally nearing its endgame.
The United States and China are on the verge of an agreement to hive off the social media giant’s US operations to a new, American-controlled consortium in a deal that will reshape the digital landscape and resolve one of the most persistent and volatile issues in Beijing-Washington relations.
This is a deal born of a national security ultimatum.
A law signed last year by then-President Joe Biden gave the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., a stark choice: sell TikTok’s US operations or be banned from the country entirely.
Now, under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on September 25, the final framework of that sale is taking shape.
The new American TikTok: a fortress of security, a web of intrigue
The core principle of the deal is simple: the new TikTok US will be majority-owned and controlled by Americans.
ByteDance will be forced to reduce its stake to less than 20 percent, with the rest of the company being sold to a consortium of “certain investors.”
While the full list of buyers remains a closely guarded secret, the software giant Oracle Corp. is expected to be the anchor tenant.
Oracle, which already provides cloud services for TikTok, is set to become the new entity’s official security provider, tasked with monitoring the app and working directly with the US government to ensure its safety.
The intrigue deepens with the other potential players. Bloomberg has reported that the private equity firm Silver Lake Management and the Abu Dhabi-based investment company MGX are also in talks to invest.
And in an interview with Fox News, President Trump himself has suggested that Fox Corp. Chairman Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Dell’s Michael Dell are also involved.
The new entity’s board will be a fortress of American security, with US citizens holding six of the seven seats, all of whom will have national security and cybersecurity credentials.
A fire sale price, a priceless algorithm
This security, however, is coming at a steep financial price for ByteDance.
US Vice President JD Vance has stated that the deal would value TikTok US at roughly 14 billion dollars.
This is a stunning and deep discount from previous estimates that had pegged the value of the wildly popular app at between 35 and 40 billion dollars.
At the heart of that valuation is the app’s most coveted and controversial asset: its algorithm.
The secret sauce that has made TikTok a global phenomenon, the powerful engine that feeds users an uncannily addictive stream of content, will be completely rebuilt.
Under the proposed deal, Oracle will lease a copy of the algorithm from ByteDance and then retrain it “from the ground up,” creating a new, American-controlled version.
The data of TikTok’s 170 million American users will be stored in a secure cloud managed by Oracle, with ByteDance being completely locked out.
The Chinese parent company will have no access to US subscriber information and no control over the algorithm that powers their feeds.
A new beginning, an uncertain future
While a deal appears imminent, the final chapter has yet to be written.
The executive order gives the parties 120 days to close the transaction, but even as Trump has claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping has given his go-ahead, Beijing has yet to publicly grant its official approval.
And then there is the question of the users themselves.
According to Bloomberg reporting, the current TikTok app will eventually be discontinued in the US, with its millions of mostly young users being migrated to a new, as-yet-unspecified platform.
For over a year, US lawmakers have been haunted by the fear that TikTok could be used as a Trojan horse by the Chinese government to spy on American citizens.
This landmark deal is designed to finally put those fears to rest, but in doing so, it will create a new and profoundly different version of the app that has captured the world’s attention.
The great TikTok carve-out is almost complete, but the story of its American future is just beginning.
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