The Trump administration is set to collect roughly $10 billion from the investors who acquired TikTok’s US operations as a fee for brokering the deal.
That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported on Friday (March 13), citing people familiar with the matter, that the payment isn’t a one-time transfer. Investors reportedly put an initial $2.5 billion to the Treasury Department when the deal closed in January.
In January, TikTok formally established a new US-majority joint venture to comply with an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump in September, which allows it to remain operational in the US.
The TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will function as an independent entity with a seven-member board that includes TikTok CEO Shou Chew.
The new arrangement keeps ByteDance as a minority stakeholder with a 19.9% holding, while three managing investors — Silver Lake, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi investor MGX — each control 15% stakes.
The WSJ said the $10 billion payment to the US government would be on top of whatever capital the investor group committed to run the new business.
Vice President JD Vance had previously said that the new TikTok entity in the US is valued at about $14 billion. The WSJ said tech analysts have deemed the figure as too low.
Trump previewed the deal last September, when he announced its framework, saying: “It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” adding that the government will likely receive compensation given the size of the deal.
Trump had previously said: “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window,” according to the WSJ.
The newspaper explained that investment banks advising on major corporate transactions typically earn under 1% of deal value, and that figure compresses further as transaction size grows. The WSJ noted that Bank of America is expected to receive around $130 million for advising Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, which the newspaper said is “one of the largest fees on record” for a single bank on a transaction.
Meanwhile, administration officials believe that the fee is justified, according to the WSJ, given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the US. In mid-September, Trump announced that he had reached an agreement with China on the sale framework. By September 25, Trump signed an executive order establishing a roadmap for the “qualified divestiture” of TikTok’s US operations to American hands.
As MBW reported, that’s a requirement of the law passed by a large bipartisan majority in Congress last year and signed by then-President Joe Biden, which requires TikTok to stop operating in the US unless its US operations are sold off from its Chinese parent company.
The president also delayed TikTok’s deadline to sell its US operations for a fourth time, to December 16, and ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce the divest-or-ban law until January 23, 2026, in order to give time for the deal to be finalized.
The WSJ said the $10 billion fee is consistent with how the administration has approached several other high-profile corporate transactions. It noted that Trump negotiated a nearly 10% equity stake in Intel and secured a portion of Nvidia‘s chip revenue to China in exchange for export licenses.
Through a so-called “golden share” arrangement tied to Nippon Steel‘s acquisition of U.S. Steel, the administration also obtained a formal role in the American steelmaker’s operations going forward, the WSJ said.
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