After months of delays and uncertainty, the Trump administration says it has agreed on the ‘framework’ for a deal with China to keep TikTok operating in the US.
Most of the details of the purported agreement are still unknown, including which investors will be buying TikTok’s US assets, or whether TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm will be part of the transaction.
But the deal will be confirmed by President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping following a phone call on Friday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
“We’re not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal. It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Bessent as saying in Madrid on Monday (September 15), where he led a US delegation in trade talks with China.
The announcement of a deal comes just two days before a September 17 deadline for the US’s “divest-or-ban” law, which requires TikTok to sell its US operations or face an effective ban on operating in the US.
The law, passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress and signed by then-President Joe Biden, was triggered by national security concerns and fears that TikTok has been giving the Chinese Communist Party access to US users’ private data – something the social media company has vehemently denied.
The law was originally meant to go into effect in January, and the app briefly went dark for US users at that time. But it came back to life after President Trump, in one of the first actions of his second term in office, ordered a 75-day delay on implementing the law. This was in order to give time for American investors to come up with a bid for TikTok.
Amid apparently stalled negotiations, Trump extended the deadline two more times, most recently to September 17. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told media on Monday that, with the exception of giving the parties more time to finalize the deal, there would be no more extensions, the WSJ reported.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon.”
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
Media reports suggested that China was resistant to the idea of selling TikTok’s US operations, and may have stood in the way of earlier bids. Notably, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is on China’s export-control list.
The WSJ suggested that China dropped its opposition to the sale in exchange for concessions on other US-China issues, including the agenda for a possible meeting between Trump and Xi this fall.
While little is known about who will acquire TikTok’s US operations, there is broad agreement that it will in some way include Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who briefly became the richest person in the world last week when Oracle stock soared.
Oracle has worked with TikTok in the US for years, including providing the social media platform with data storage inside the US, and, as CNN noted, the company was part of a short-lived bid to buy the social media app in 2020, when President Trump – then in his first term – was pushing for a TikTok ban at the time.
(Despite his earlier opposition to TikTok, Trump warmed to the platform during the 2024 election campaign, and vowed to keep it operational in the US. Last month, the White House officially joined TikTok.)
Oracle has been among the companies most commonly tipped to take control of TikTok in the US. It had put together a bid as part of a consortium with tech giant Andreessen Horowitz and investment giant Blackstone, though Blackstone reportedly backed out of the bid in July.
Other investors tipped to be interested in TikTok include Amazon, Microsoft, and a consortium that includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and former LA Dodgers owner Frank McCourt.
Some finance experts speculated that some of these entities would have a hard time raising the money to buy TikTok US, which is expected to sell in the tens of billions of dollars.Music Business Worldwide
