It sounds like Trump pals Larry Ellison and Marc Andreesen are about to get their hands on TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Ellison’s software giant Oracle, Andreesen’s venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, and private equity firm Silver Lake are among a group of U.S. businesses said to be nearing a deal to take over the American operations of the short-form video app, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The deal would create a new U.S. entity to control the app’s U.S. operations. American investors would hold an 80% stake in the new company, with the remaining 20% allocated to Chinese investors. The new company’s board would have one member designated by the U.S. government.
TikTok users in the U.S. would be asked to move to a new app that uses content-recommendation technology made by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Oracle would store U.S. users’ data in a facility in Texas.
The White House released an executive order stating that a “framework” deal was in place and that the ban on TikTok in the U.S. is delayed until Dec. 16, following The Journal’s report.
“Any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration,” a senior White House official told the publication.
Ellison’s Oracle has long been linked to American ownership of TikTok in the United States, and the 81-year-old billionaire, who briefly became the world’s richest person last week, is close with Donald Trump. In November of 2020, he discussed efforts to overthrow the election results on a phone call with Trump, Sean Hannity, Sen. Lindsey Graham and others. Trump has openly said he wants Ellison to get control over TikTok in the U.S.
Ellison’s son, David Ellison, 42, also has a huge stake in the media. He took over Paramount, and thus CBS, swiftly angering staff by reports he was purchasing “anti-woke” columnist Bari Weiss’ The Free Press with an eye to giving her a senior position. He is also looking to buy the embattled Warner Bros. from David Zaslav.
Andreesen, meanwhile, became a Trump adviser during his second term. The 54-year-old expressed how he wanted to target universities as the center of the counterattack against liberals in a WhatsApp group, The Washington Post reported in July.
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote in messages to Trump officials. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”
Should Ellison and Andreesen gain control over TikTok in the U.S., it would make the app another social media platform controlled by Trump-friendly billionaires, which already includes Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Meta, and Elon Musk, who owns X.
The post Trumpy Billionaires Close in on TikTok Takeover appeared first on The Daily Beast.
