President Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to sign a deal to facilitate the sale of TikTok from a Chinese-based company to a group of American investors, two senior White House officials told NBC News.
Members of the Trump administration have for days signaled that a deal was being finalized between Chinese and U.S. officials.
A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that once the deal is implemented, TikTok’s U.S. operations would be run by a new joint-venture company. ByteDance, TikTok’s current China-based owner, will hold less than 20% of the stock of the new company, the official said.
NBC News reached out to TikTok for comment.
This structure will comply with a bipartisan law passed in 2024 that sought to ban TikTok if the platform were not sold to U.S.-based owners this year. The app briefly shut down in the U.S. in January, just a day before Trump was inaugurated to his second term.
The app came back online in the U.S. after the incoming president promised not to enforce the penalties for TikTok in the law and said he would seek to make a deal with China for the platform’s sale to the U.S.
Trump has extended the deadline to avoid a TikTok ban several times this year. On Wednesday, a senior White House official said that he plans to extend the pause for another 120 days to allow time for the deal to go through.
For years, technology experts and U.S. officials warned that TikTok, which has over 170 million U.S. users, was a national security risk and that ByteDance could give the Chinese government access to user data and to the app’s algorithm.
During Trump’s first term, he signed an executive order in 2020 aimed at banning TikTok, but then-President Joe Biden reversed it the following year. Biden ultimately signed the bipartisan TikTok bill into law.
On Wednesday, a senior White House official confirmed that as part of the deal, American users’ data will be stored in the U.S. and overseen by software and cloud computing company Oracle. They added that the platform’s algorithm will be retrained and continuously monitored to ensure that U.S. content is free from any outside manipulation.
On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that the deal was almost over the finish line and that the “deal just needs to be signed.”
She added that the deal would create a board to oversee TikTok with six seats reserved for American investors, but did not say who those American investors would be.
On Sunday, Trump told Fox News in a separate interview that Oracle’s co-founder, Larry Ellison, would play a role in the deal. He also said that Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, and the Murdoch family, which owns a media empire that includes News Corp and Fox Corp, would also play a role.
The president added that the other business leaders involved in the deal are “really great people, very prominent people.”
“And they’re also American patriots, you know, they love this country, so I think they’re going to do a really good job,” he added.
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