President Donald Trump has formally endorsed the plan to sell TikTok’s US operations to a new business majority owned by American investors.
On Thursday (Sept 25), the President signed an executive order which says that plan complies with the sell-or-be-banned law passed by Congress last year over data security concerns.
The new U.S. company will be valued at around $14 billion, according to Vice President JD Vance, though the White House did not indicate how it reached that valuation.
The current owner, China-based ByteDance, will have to sell the app to avoid it being banned in the country. That law was designed to allay concerns that the Chinese government had access to TikTok user-data via ByteDance.
The “proposed divestiture” that has been months in the making, will “allow the millions of Americans who enjoy TikTok every day to continue using it while also protecting national security”, according to Trump’s executive order.
The app’s American operations will be run by a joint venture among American investors, owners and boards of directors, such as tech giant Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners. The White House said Oracle is expected to oversee the app’s security, including the algorithm. The American consortium will have a majority stake of about 80%, with ByteDance holding no more than a 20% stake.
The president said his national security concerns had been satisfied because TikTok would be owned by “sophisticated, smart Americans.”
Vance told reporters the Chinese resisted the deal, but “we wanted to keep TikTok operating” while protecting American users’ data so they could “use it with more confidence than they had in the past.”
“This is going to be American-operated all the way, and 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,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
When asked whether TikTok’s algorithm will show MAGA-related content, Trump responded, “If I could make it 100 percent MAGA, I would. But it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately.” Trump added that, “every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated fairly.”