President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday approving a deal to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States, as the Chinese app becomes majority-owned by American interests in a new joint-venture company.
The deal involves TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, selling the social media app’s U.S. operations to a consortium of American investors, Breitbart News reported earlier this week. American technology giant Oracle, co-founded by centibillionaire Larry Ellison, will be entrusted to retrain the formerly Chinese-controlled TikTok algorithm “from the ground up” to create a separate, more secure version for U.S. users, according to Bloomberg.
Trump continued to delay the impending TikTok ban in order to have enough time for the deal to fall into place, with Vice President JD Vance saying as the order was signed, “There was some resistance on the Chinese side.”
“So this is interesting because I had a very good talk with President Xi,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I have a lot of respect for him, hopefully he has a lot of respect for me too. And we talked about TikTok — and other things, but we talked about TikTok — and he gave us the go-ahead.”
He continued on to say the platform will be run by “great” American investors and that Vance “was very much involved and in charge” of the deal with China.
Vance then thanked Trump for his help, saying “We really couldn’t have done this without the President actually ushering this deal over the finish line. There was some resistance on the Chinese side.”
“But the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans data privacy as required by law, both because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s a legal requirement of the law that was passed last year by Congress,” the vice president continued, before explaining that Americans can use the app “with more confidence” going forward, “because their data is going to be secure and it’s not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens.”
The new company “will be operated by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, with ByteDance choosing only one director of the seven-seat board,” NewsNation reported, noting that ByteDance will “also be excluded from the company’s security committee.”
Oracle will have the job of monitoring the security of U.S. TikTok operations, along with algorithm retraining.
“U.S. data will be stored in the country without access from China, on a secure cloud environment built by Oracle,” the outlet noted. “Technical controls will guard the U.S. systems to provide specific access control of both people and data.”
Trump went on to explain that “the young people” wanted the deal to happen so they could continue using TikTok, and credited the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk with bringing the app to his campaign’s attention.
“I used it myself during the campaign, and it was very successful, because, you know how I did with the young voters? And Charlie helped me a lot too. And he said to me, ‘You should go on TikTok… We got record votes with the young voters, you know, for the election.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
