Years of uncertainty around a possible TikTok ban in the United States may finally be coming to an end.
The Trump administration is reportedly very close to finalizing a deal with China to transfer US operations of the app to American control. Details are still murky, but right now it looks like the social media behemoth, which has around 170 million American users, will be run by a consortium of rich, right-wing investors, notably including the tech company Oracle and the Fox Corporation, which owns Fox News.
If — and it is still an if — this deal is finalized, it would mark the end of a five-year-plus odyssey for TikTok’s American presence. President Donald Trump attempted to ban the app over concerns about its Chinese ownership during his first term, without success. Congress acted more definitively in 2024, passing a law that required TikTok to be sold to American operators or shut down. But when Trump came back into office, he had a change of heart — young voters shifted toward Trump in 2024, and his campaign attributed some of its success to its presence on the platform. Since then, Trump has signed a series of (possibly illegal) executive orders delaying implementation of the ban.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King talked with Wall Street Journal reporter Amrith Ramkumar about this backstory, what a US version of TikTok might look like, and the low-key billionaire who stands to get the keys to the app.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
We are seeing a headline that suggests America is going to get TikTok. What is America going to get, exactly?
The biggest thing is that the app will continue operating in the US. You’re going to be able to continue using it. So that’s step number one, I think, and that’s what the administration is focusing a lot on, that they’re the ones that prevented the app from going dark and any changes there.
But if you dig a little deeper, it is also very important that a group of US investors will now gain control of TikTok’s US operations. That’s been something a lot of people in Washington have been pushing for over five years, and it seems like they’re on the doorstep of making that happen.
What about the thing that makes TikTok TikTok, which is the algorithm? Does the US get that too?
That is the tens-of-billions-of-dollars question. Essentially the answer would be yes, based on what the administration and people around TikTok have said. There’d be a complex way of doing this where ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, would copy the algorithm it uses globally and then lease it to this new [US] entity that is being created by this transaction. The new entity would then control it and they would run it. It would be a US-specific algorithm, sort of.
President Trump says he’ll sign an executive order about it later this week. What is in the deal? What do we know?
The deal’s not done. That’s the first thing to understand. It’s a preliminary agreement, sort of a framework. This executive order that the president is going to sign is basically going to say, from what we can tell, that we have the contours of the deal and they satisfy the law and the national security conditions. That’s one step in the process of finalizing things.
“It’s not in their financial interest to come in and make a bunch of changes that overhaul things.”
Basically, under this deal, US investors and allies essentially will take control of this new entity that’s created to run TikTok in the US. The understanding is that this new group of US investors, this consortium, featuring the private equity firm Silver Lake and cloud computing company Oracle, would be part of this group and they would own roughly half of this new entity. Existing ByteDance investors, which include some Trump allies, would own roughly 30 percent. That’s what lets ByteDance’s ownership stake drop just below the 20 percent outlined in the law. And it’s also important to note that that consortium has been changing by the day.
Trump mentioned the Murdochs over the weekend. He said Lachlan [Murdoch] might be involved.
Yes. And we’re told that basically means Fox would invest. He mentioned Michael Dell, who’s also been reported around this. He could be involved. But Trump loves that element, right? Because now he has this framework agreement and investors are calling saying, We want to be part of this deal because we know this is a very valuable company and a lucrative opportunity. And so now he can sort of pick and choose who he lets in.
So Oracle has a significant stake. Others may join, others may drop out, but Oracle is a real player here, and we can’t talk about Oracle without talking about Larry Ellison. Who is Larry Ellison?
How much time do you have? Larry Ellison is one of the richest men in the world. He co-founded Oracle. Start there. Oracle is one of the most important tech companies that most regular people have never heard about. They’re experts at working with large databases, which are key to the social media industry. More importantly now, Oracle is now seen as one of the leading AI companies because they do AI infrastructure and they work with companies like OpenAI.
But Larry Ellison has also expanded in other ways. His family is now preparing a bid for Warner Bros. through their company, Paramount Skydance. He has a lot of money. He’s pretty strategic with what he does with it. But yes, this TikTok deal would be his latest big win.
This has made a lot of people quite leery. You have a wealthy old man, a lot of wealthy old men involved in this consortium, Trump-aligned for the most part, controlling TikTok. Will they be able to manipulate the algorithm? Are they the ones who are going to be deciding what I see on TikTok?
That’s another really good question and something that hasn’t been fully addressed yet. I think priority one is showing they can run the app. They still have to prove the basic business case, the justification for doing a deal worth many billions of dollars.
It’s not in their financial interest to come in and make a bunch of changes that overhaul things. These people just want this deal done. TikTok just wants to operate in the US and users just want the experience to remain the same. Making changes or doing things that would be very disruptive seems against their own interests there.
