Trump to sign TikTok deal today; ByteDance to be left with 20% of stock: Report

US President Donald Trump will likely sign a TikTok deal on Thursday, bringing an end to the uncertainty of the video-sharing platform’s fate, as an agreement would facilitate its sale to American investors.

According to a report by NBC, the new deal will transfer ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok to  a new joint-venture company based in the US, while the Chinese firm will only be left with less than 20 per cent of the stock.

The structure would align with a bipartisan law passed in 2024, which aimed to ban TikTok unless it was sold to US-based owners by this year. The app was briefly shut down in the United States in January, just one day before Trump’s second-term inauguration.

A senior White House official told the outlet that Trump is expected to extend a delay on TikTok’s ban for 120 more days to allow time for the deal to go through. Last week, he signed an executive order to extend a delay on banning TikTok for another 3 months.

Oracle to store TikTok data

A White House official has said that an agreement to sell the popular Chinese-owned app to a consortium of American investors is taking shape, days after a deadline to ban the app was extended for a few months.

Often described as TikTok’s “secret sauce,” the fate of the video-sharing app’s algorithm was one of the main question marks in persuading China to allow the platform’s transfer to US ownership.

The arrangement, detailed by a US official on Monday, aims to give American buyers control over TikTok’s recommendation algorithm within the US after its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests. Under the plan, the US-based TikTok owners would lease a version of the algorithm from ByteDance, which would then be retrained “from the ground up” under Oracle’s supervision.

Who are the buyers?

While the full list of buyers is not finalised yet, Trump has said that media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation, could be part of the TikTok deal.

Apart from this, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder, has consistently been a prominent figure among potential buyers. Reports suggest he may be leading a consortium of investors that could include asset manager Blackstone, private equity firm Silver Lake, Walmart, and billionaire Frank McCourt.