TikTok accepts changes; Trump to review plan
WASHINGTON — The Chinese company that owns TikTok has accepted the Trump administration’s changes to a deal designed to mitigate the White House’s concerns that the popular app poses a national security threat, two people with knowledge of the talks said.
The Treasury Department, which leads a group reviewing the deal for national security purposes, provided TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, with revisions to its proposal Wednesday, one of the people said. Some of the revisions were intended to address how TikTok’s data and source code would be handled and secured, one of the people said. The two sides have agreed in principle but are still discussing some technical details, the other person said.
The exact ownership structure of TikTok
under the proposed deal is unclear. President Trump and some members of his administration have said that ByteDance cannot retain a majority stake in TikTok if their concerns are to be satisfied. Oracle, the Redwood City business softwaremaker, is set to be a technology partner for TikTok while taking an ownership stake in the app but would not own it outright, people with knowledge of the situation have said.
Any resolution on ownership could involve some tricky math. The percentage of TikTok owned by nonU.S. interests depends partly on how officials treat the portion of ByteDance, a privately held company, that is already backed by U.S. investors, one person said.
TikTok would also go public on a U.S. stock market in about a year if the deal went through, the person said. While that plan is not a formal part of the proposal being vetted by the government, it is something the Trump administration is aware of, the person said.
The deal still requires approval from Trump. As of early Thursday afternoon, the president had not been briefed on it. One person familiar with the deliberations said the meeting had not been scheduled but would happen “soon.”
An executive order signed by Trump essentially mandates that TikTok strike a deal to sell its U.S. operations by Sunday or risk having all of its commercial transactions halted in the United States. TikTok has became a point of contention between the United States and China, which have increasingly battled over trade, security and tech dominance.
Some Republican lawmakers, such as Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, have criticized any deal that would leave ByteDance in control of TikTok’s code or algorithms as inadequate in addressing national security concerns. That has raised questions of whether Trump could face criticism for the OracleTikTok proposal while running for reelection.
TikTok and a spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment. Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.