A consortium of investors led by tech giant Oracle, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and private equity firm Silver Lake is set to control Tiktok in the United States, as Washington and Beijing hammer out a deal to ring fence the popular app’s US operations.
- •The new entity will hold an 80% stake in TikTok in the US, with ByteDance, the app’s parent company, holding 20%.
- •ByteDance has already built a new standalone app which will be separate in all aspects including a separate algorithm.
- •As the two sides iron out a deal, President Donald Trump has extended the deadline of the ban on the app in the US to mid-December.
The looming ban on the popular app, which has already been extended several times, was triggered by multiple privacy concerns that its structure allowed for US user’s data to be shared with China. It came amidst a wider crackdown on Chinese-owned apps for national security concerns, and has survived since Trump’s first term, with former President Joe Biden signing the law that formalised the ban.
Although details of the deal seem to largely keep to that law, such as a provision that Chinese entities can not own more than 20% of the app, it is still dependent on a formal agreement between Beijing and Washington. The deal’s sticky points had largely been agreed on by April, but Trump’s global tariffs, which triggered a new level in the trade war with China, nearly scuttled it.
Once finalised, the structure will mirror the situation ByteDance has with TikTok in its home market. The Chinese version, known as Douyin, has a separate algorithm and was designed exclusively to work within China’s “Great Firewall.”