(Bloomberg) — TikTok\u2019s long-delayed plan to separate from Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. was put in motion Thursday when the video sharing sensation said it\u2019s being bought by a group of buyers led by Oracle Corp.<\/p>\n
TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew told employees that the company and ByteDance signed binding agreements to create a US joint venture majority-owned by American investors, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg. Chew wrote that he was \u201cpleased to share some great news\u201d and said agreements with Oracle, Silver Lake Management and MGX have been signed. The deal is expected to close on Jan. 22, 2026, though Chew added that \u201cthere\u2019s more work to be done\u201d before then.<\/p>\n
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Chinese regulators have yet to say whether they\u2019ll approve the transaction.<\/p>\n
Upon closing, the US joint venture will operate as an independent entity that will control data protection, content moderation and algorithm security in the country, Chew told employees in the memo. The new US entity will also be \u201cgoverned by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors,\u201d he added. Oracle shares jumped nearly 6% in after-hours trading Thursday.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Bryan van der Beek\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
The memo outlined a deal that matched what the White House announced in September, which was pending approval from China at the time and valued TikTok\u2019s US operations at roughly $14 billion. Chew\u2019s memo Thursday didn\u2019t mention China\u2019s opinion on the transaction, which would wrest some \u2014 but not total \u2014 control of TikTok US from ByteDance. Under the arrangement, 50% of the investors in TikTok US will be new, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based investment company, each gaining 15% ownership; 30.1% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance.<\/p>\n
The terms outlined in the CEO\u2019s memo appear to leave the door open for ByteDance to potentially retain oversight of key parts of US TikTok, an app used by half the country. Bloomberg News previously reported that the Chinese parent company would retain roughly 50% of the profit from TikTok\u2019s US operations. ByteDance\u2019s involvement has long been a sticking point in negotiations, and has led critics, including members of Trump\u2019s own political party, to argue that the arrangement the White House negotiated may not pass legal muster. The national security law passed and signed under former President Joe Biden mandated that TikTok US and ByteDance have no operational relationship.<\/p>\n
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ByteDance\u2019s coveted content algorithms are considered central to TikTok\u2019s business. Under the version of the deal recently outlined by the White House, ByteDance is expected to license its AI recommendation technology to the newly created US TikTok entity, which will use the existing algorithm to retrain a new system on US data that is secured by Oracle, TikTok\u2019s cloud partner.<\/p>\n
Oracle\u2019s role as a data security guard has also raised concerns. The arrangement mirrors an earlier TikTok-Oracle collaboration proposed years ago to the US government as a way to solve similar concerns about TikTok\u2019s Chinese ownership. That team-up, called Project Texas, was ultimately rejected by the US government and deemed insufficient to address national security issues.<\/p>\n
If finalized, the deal will remove a persistent issue in Beijing-Washington relations and signal progress in broader negotiations between the two countries, which have sparred on trade and other issues.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s TikTok Deal With China \u2014 What Do We Know?: QuickTake<\/p>\n
The White House had dominated disclosures about the proposed arrangement, which was mandated on national security grounds by a law signed last year under the Joe Biden administration. US officials have expressed concern that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and are worried that Beijing could use the app to collect data about US citizens or push specific narratives to Americans via the app\u2019s recommendation algorithm.<\/p>\n
Under the law, the initial deadline for the sell-or-ban rule was this past January, but Trump extended this deadline multiple times since reentering office, most recently pushing it into January 2026.<\/p>\n
For months, as the prospect of a ban under Trump has become less and less likely, TikTok has been operating business as usual and further planting its flag as a dominant cultural force in the US. It has been pushing aggressively into e-commerce and livestream shopping, including partnering with major American tech companies including Amazon.com Inc. The same day that Chew announced an agreement had been reached, TikTok held its first-ever Oscars-style red carpet show, The TikTok Awards, in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Updates with additional background starting in the third paragraph. An earlier version corrected the company name in the first paragraph.)<\/p>\n
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\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Bloomberg) — TikTok\u2019s long-delayed plan to separate from Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. was put in motion Thursday when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5311],"tags":[3662,197274,197273,449,49,978,659,1018],"class_list":["post-641430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-bloomberg","tag-chew","tag-shou-chew","tag-tiktok","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-white-house"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115744010616940765","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}