The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and other outlets reported on September 22 (local time) that U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to approve an agreement between the United States and China regarding the sale of TikTok's U.S. operations through an executive order later this week.
According to senior White House officials, President Trump is set to sign an executive order later this week stating that the agreement reached between the two countries on how TikTok will operate within the United States meets legal requirements.
TikTok is a popular platform in the United States, but concerns about the risk of personal data leaks and national security threats have been raised since 2019 because its parent company is the Chinese firm ByteDance.
The Trump administration negotiated with China over a plan for U.S. companies to acquire a majority stake in TikTok, and on September 14 reached a broad agreement during high-level U.S.-China trade talks held in Madrid, Spain.
Under the agreement, a new entity will be established to operate TikTok in the United States, with American investors such as Oracle and the private equity firm Silver Lake holding approximately 80% of the shares. ByteDance's stake will be reduced to less than 20%. In an interview with Fox News the previous day, President Trump also mentioned American investors who may participate in the acquisition of TikTok's U.S. operations, including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch, and Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Technologies.
The new entity will form its board of directors primarily with Americans and will include one director designated by the U.S. government.
To prevent personal data leaks, all data of U.S. users will be stored in U.S.-based cloud infrastructure operated by Oracle. According to officials, China will not have access to this data. To dispel concerns that the content recommendation algorithm could be controlled by the Chinese side, the algorithm will be retrained as a new version. However, even after the algorithm is updated, users will still be able to access the service through the existing application.
WSJ reported that the U.S. government is expected to receive billions of dollars in fees as part of this agreement.
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