The TikTok Deal Is Done. Sort of. Like, so close

They’re playing out the clock on TikTok.

President Donald Trump put pen to paper Thursday on an executive order that outlined a path for control of the social media app to be transferred from its parent, ByteDance, to a consortium including US tech giant Oracle, Silicon Valley private equity shop Silver Lake, and Emirati AI investor MGX.

But the agreement still requires signoff from the involved parties, notably on the Chinese side. When all is said and done (or if all is said and done), Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX are expected to control about 50% of the company. ByteDance and some of its existing investors are expected to control roughly 30%. Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the new US TikTok could be worth $14 billion.

Pretty Easy TikTok Challenge

Whatever the valuation, the value of getting a deal done would be priceless — if only to put an end to more than a year of speculation about the wildly popular app’s future. That began when Congress passed a bipartisan law in April 2024 to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a US-based owner, and, finally, there soon may be breathing room to focus on the zillion other things going on in 2025. Including the more interesting post-deal future of TikTok:

• There’s no clear picture yet of what strategy the new owners expect for the US spinoff. ByteDance has seen major growth by pushing into e-commerce with TikTok Shop, but that could always give way to its traditional ad focus — the only problem there being whether ad buyers will be able to run global campaigns if TikTok is segmented between the US and the rest of the world.
• The US TikTok will license the app’s addictive algorithm from ByteDance, the White House has said, and store data on US users to populate the algorithm stateside. The White House also said Oracle will “retrain” and “continuously monitor” the US TikTok algorithm to prevent “improper manipulation or surveillance,” giving it tremendous power over the consumption habits of its more than 170 million American users.

Beyond Dance Crazes: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close Trump ally, and his co-partners are getting more than just a place for memes, trends and shopping: A Pew poll published this week found that one in five US adults regularly get news from TikTok, a massive increase from just 3% in 2020.