President Trump is expected to sign an executive order this week that would allow TikTok to fall under American ownership and continue operating in the U.S.
According to a Senior White House official, the deal “is going to save TikTok for over 170 million U.S. users while making sure that it's safe and secure.”
The proposal would create a new joint venture to run TikTok, partly owned by U.S. investors and its current parent company, ByteDance, which could hold no more than a 20% stake.
The White House says the new joint venture would be run by a U.S.-based board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials.
The 80% stake in TikTok would be controlled by American companies, with the U.S. Government taking no direct stake in the venture. Some of those American companies include private equity firm Silver Lake, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and tech giant Oracle.
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The White House confirmed that Oracle would serve as the new venture’s main security provider.
“It's going to provide top-to-bottom security throughout the company, including how the app fits in your phone and interacts with the phone, how it's upgraded, how American data is stored here in the United States on Oracle systems, and how the content recommendation algorithm works,” according to the Senior White House Official.
The Official went on to say that the deal would provide a copy of TikTok's content recommendation algorithm to be “fully inspected and retrained by the security provider on U.S. user data” and then “operated by that U.S. community and continuously monitored as it operates.”
Although a final deal has not officially been announced yet, administration officials say they feel “100% confident that the deal will be approved and has been approved,” by their Chinese counterparts.
A final valuation for the proposal has also not been revealed, but the Trump administration estimates that the app could generate billions of dollars in economic activity over the next five years. According to a report conducted by ByteDance, TikTok added more than $24 billion to the U.S. economy in 2024.
“We're trying to preserve all of the economic value for the country that goes along with having this operational, as the President said, it's billions and billions of dollars of economic activity. And preserving that while maintaining our national security has been the president's number one priority,” according to a Senior White House Official.
