US President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. | Photo Credit: Bloomberg

President Donald Trump advanced plans for American investors to buy TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd., with officials setting a potential value of $14 billion and outlining measures to ensure security of the new venture. 

In an executive order signed Thursday at the White House, Trump declared that the deal complies with a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest control or face a prohibition in the US of the popular video-sharing platform. Trump also reiterated that he had won approval from his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for the deal.

“I had a very good talk with President Xi,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office of the White House. “We talked about TikTok and other things, but we talked about TikTok and he gave us the go-ahead.”

The deal Trump is seeking to finalise would spin out TikTok’s US business into a new, US-based venture owned mainly by American investors, with ByteDance’s stake shrunk to less than 20 per cent, as required by the national security law. A sale would help fulfill a Trump campaign promise and remove an irritant in relations with China.

Trump and other US officials stressed that the agreement would safeguard American users’ data, with Oracle Corp. charged with keeping their information in a secure cloud and helping the new TikTok entity protect the app’s recommendation software from foreign influence.

Even with Trump’s endorsement, the transaction remains shrouded in uncertainty, since China has yet to say publicly whether it has granted its approval. The Chinese embassy didn’t immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment following Trump’s latest remarks.

Key elements of the deal remain unclear, including the composition of the buyers group. Oracle, Silver Lake Management LLC, and the Abu Dhabi-based investment company MGX are in talks to invest in TikTok US and receive board seats in the new venture, according to people familiar with the discussions who cautioned that the talks remain fluid.

Another loose end is the price tag of the new US venture: Vice President JD Vance, who played a central role in crafting the deal, said Thursday the transaction would value the new US company at roughly $14 billion. 

“Ultimately, the investors are going to make the determination about what they want to invest in and what they think is the proper value,” Vance said.

Vance’s estimate fell far below some previous projections that valued the US operations at about $35 billion to $40 billion. Valuing TikTok’s US operations has always been difficult given uncertainty around the technology involved in any deal, specifically the app’s coveted content algorithm.

Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said the $14 billion valuation was in line with their estimate for TikTok’s expected US advertising revenues for 2026. 

“Advertising is TikTok’s core line of business in the US, and there are still many unanswered questions about how the new business will operate,” Enberg said in a statement.

The order gives the parties 120 days to close, marking the fifth deadline extension granted by Trump, testing the boundaries of the divest-or-ban law, which allowed for only one enforcement pause. The deal now must close by the end of January, more than a year after the law took effect.

The president’s move sets up a potential confrontation with US lawmakers who remain skeptical that the deal taking shape meets the terms of the 2024 law. Members of Congress are vowing to scrutinise the accord — particularly whether it ends ByteDance’s control over TikTok and its coveted recommendation software in the US.

“If a deal has been struck, the details need to be shared with Congress,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Monday. His Republican counterpart leading the committee, Representative John Moolenaar, said last week that he planned on “discussing these issues with the transaction parties to ensure any deal adheres to the law’s legal requirements.”

It remains unclear how far lawmakers, especially Trump’s fellow Republicans, will go in challenging the president over the terms.

Under the deal, owners of the US-based TikTok would lease a copy of the algorithm from ByteDance that would then be retrained “from the ground up” with Oracle’s oversight, according to a US official. Oracle would inspect the retrained algorithm, and how it’s feeding content to users, to help the US entity ensure it’s not being used for malicious purposes or otherwise influenced.

Data from US users would be stored in a secure cloud managed by Oracle with controls established to keep out foreign adversaries, including China, the official said. ByteDance would not have access to information on TikTok’s US subscribers, the official said. The setup mirrors the multibillion-dollar partnership known as Project Texas, where Oracle was tasked with separating and securing TikTok’s US user data from China. TikTok proposed the Project Texas collaboration with Oracle to the Biden administration in 2022 to allay national security concerns, but the US government ultimately rejected it as an adequate solution.

It’s unclear whether that arrangement will satisfy longstanding concerns among authorities in Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry has said only that “the Chinese government respects the wishes of the company in question, and would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations in keeping with market rules lead to a solution that complies with China’s laws and regulations and takes into account the interests of both sides.”

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Published on September 26, 2025