TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has struck a deal with a board of American investors backed by President Donald Trump to create a new U.S version of the app, bringing an end to the yearslong legal saga that sought to decouple the app from its Chinese ownership over national security concerns.
The new company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, will follow a governance structure outlined by the Trump administration in an executive order last year. It will be majority-owned by three managing investors: the software giant Oracle, the Emirati state-owned investment fund MGX and the global private equity firm SilverLake. The Dell Family Office, the personal investment firm of the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell, is also an investor.
The U.S. app will “operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users,” according to a news release from TikTok on Thursday announcing the deal. The deal is intended to address national security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China, which lawmakers and regulatory experts have long worried could use the data of more than 200 million American users for adverse purposes.
ByteDance will retain just less than 20% ownership of the new joint venture, which falls in line with Trump’s demands that the app be majority-owned by U.S. companies in order to continue operating. A seven-member board of directors, majority American, will be tasked with governing the app’s U.S. operations.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will have a seat on the board. He will be joined by Timothy Dattels, senior adviser to investment firm TPG Global; Mark Dooley of Susquehanna International Group; Egon Durban of Silver Lake; Raul Fernandez of DXC Technology; Kenneth Glueck of Oracle; and David Scott of MGX.
The deal marks the end of a winding legal journey for the popular short-form video app. In 2024, Congress passed a law that required ByteDance to divest its interest in TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban. TikTok appealed, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the law, days before Trump was set to return to the White House for his second term.
After the deadline for a sale passed, the app briefly went dark in the U.S. Trump, who had been a critic of the app in 2020 after it skyrocketed in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic and tried to force a sale to U.S. companies, repeatedly vowed to “save TikTok” upon returning to the White House.
Trump credited the app’s Generation Z influencers and content creators, many of them young male supporters whose sphere of influence worked to send him back to the White House, as reason for doing so.
On Sept. 25, Trump signed an executive order that laid out a framework for establishing a U.S. joint venture to move the app under primarily U.S. ownership and safeguard American user data. That data will now be largely managed by Oracle, the software company whose CEO, Larry Ellison, is a close Trump ally. Trump had pushed Ellison to buy TikTok from ByteDance last year. “U.S. user data will be protected by USDS Joint Venture in Oracle’s secure U.S. cloud environment,” the news release said. “The Joint Venture will operate a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program that is audited and certified by third party cybersecurity experts.” Trump celebrated the finalization of the U.S. joint venture in a post on his social media platform Thursday, calling the U.S. investors a “group of Great American Patriots and Investors.” “Along with other factors, it was responsible for my doing so well with the Youth Vote in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump said. “I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
