US President Donald Trump looks set to approve the US takeover of TikTok’s operations in America this week, a new report says.
Trump is expected to issue an executive order that says his administration is satisfied that legal requirements linked to TikTok have been met under a recent agreement with Chinese officials, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that cited a senior White House official.
This would cap months of US-China deliberations that underscored wider trade talks and solidify the timeline for a much-awaited deal to keep the popular short video app running in the US.
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Trump has said that the United States and China have made progress on a deal requiring TikTok’s American assets to be transferred to US owners from China’s ByteDance.
The deal would also stipulate that the TikTok algorithm is “secured, retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control,” Reuters reported on Saturday, citing a White House official
TikTok and the White House did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Trump said on Sunday that media mogul Lachlan Murdoch and business leaders Larry Ellison and Michael Dell would be involved as US investors in a proposed deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States.
Under the expected deal, TikTok’s US assets would be majority-owned by American investors and operated in the United States by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, the White House official said.
Existing investors and a group of new US backers that includes private-equity firm Silver Lake and cloud-computing firm Oracle would together own about 80% of the company, WSJ reported on Monday.
The agreement requires that all data on American users be stored on US cloud computing infrastructure run by Oracle.
A consortium of new investors, including private-equity firm Silver Lake and Oracle, would own roughly half of a new entity created to run TikTok in the US, the WSJ reported.
Existing investors such as trading firm Susquehanna International would hold about 30%, it said.
TikTok parent ByteDance’s stake would dip below 20%.
- Reuters with additional editing by Jim Pollard
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