President Donald Trump will a sign an executive order later this week approving the deal to save TikTok after Congress banned usage of the Chinese-owned app in the United States.
“The president is going to issue an executive order later this week, and I expect that ByteDance is going to sign a framework agreement with one or more managing investors, new investors to set out the parameters,” a senior White House official told press Monday morning.
The White House has four-times extended the deadline to reach a deal with Chinese-owned ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American-backed owner. Congress passed a law April 24, 2024, requiring ByteDance to divest its stake in the U.S. assets of TikTok due to national security concerns.
“President Trump and Vice President Vance have negotiated another outstanding deal on behalf of the American people,” the senior White House official said. “It’s going to save TikTok for over 170 million U.S. users while making sure that it’s safe and secure.”
The deal moves TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new joint venture based in America. It will have a majority of American investors and owners and a majority American Board of Directors. The joint venture also brings in American technology company Oracle as the security provider.
“It’s going to provide sort of top to bottom security throughout the company, including how the app sits in your phone and interacts with the phone, how it’s updated, how American data is stored here in the United States on Oracle systems, and how the content recommendation algorithm works, and really every part of the source code of the app,” the official said.
Vance was very involved in developing a strategy to reach the TikTok deal framework leading up to the U.S.-China summit in Madrid last Sunday. The vice president’s counsel, who has been heavily involved in negotiations on behalf of Vance, also played an important role in the Madrid talks, a White House official previously told The Daily Signal.
The deal will save thousands of jobs and small businesses who use the app to promote their work, an official said.
“The estimates are that it’s going to be hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity over the next five years,” the official said. “And I think it’s really worth emphasizing as part of this deal that this is a problem that the Biden administration failed to solve, could not solve, and their decisions that they thought it was best to destroy all of its value, to let the app go dark.”
