A TikTok deal has finally been reached with China, the Trump administration says
CNN Newsource
By David Goldman, CNN
(CNN) — A deal has been reached between the Trump administration and China to keep TikTok operational in the United States, administration officials announced Monday, concluding a yearslong effort that began during President Donald Trump’s first term.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that a framework agreement has been reached, and Trump will speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Friday to finalize the deal. The agreement and conversation is a precursor to a Trump-Xi meeting that both sides have sought for months, US officials said Monday after a framework plan was announced.
“President Trump played a role in this, we had a call with him last night, we had specific guidance from him we shared it with our Chinese counterparts,” Bessent said in Madrid on Monday. “Without his leadership and the leverage he provides, we would not have been able to include the deal today.”
The Trump administration did not name the US-backed buyer, but the group is widely expected to be led by Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, who last week briefly became the world’s richest person. Trump in January had said he would champion Ellison, a Trump supporter, buying the app’s US assets.
Chinese and US diplomats have been meeting this week in Spain to discuss trade and other matters. Bessent, leading the latest round of trade talks with China on behalf of the United States, had said that TikTok was one of the subjects likely to be discussed.
“We were very focused on TikTok and making sure that it was a deal that is fair for the Chinese and completely respects US national security concerns, and that’s the deal we reached,” said US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Monday. “And of course, we want to ensure that the Chinese have a fair, invested environment in the United States, but always that US national security comes first.”
Li Chenggang, China’s top trade negotiator and vice minister of commerce, said the two sides held “candid and in-depth exchanges” and reached a “basic framework consensus” to keep TikTok operational in the US.
The framework agreed upon includes “resolving TikTok-related issues through cooperation, reducing investment barriers, and promoting relevant economic and trade cooperation,” Li told reporters in Madrid, according to Chinese state media, adding that China won’t seek any deal at the expense of its principles or corporate interests.
Wang Jingtao, a deputy director of China’s Cyberspace Administration, said the deal could include methods such as the entrusted operation of TikTok’s US user data and the licensing of algorithms and intellectual property rights, Chinese state media reported.
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment about the status of a deal.
Trump multiple times has extended a self-imposed deadline to reach a deal with China to sell at least part of TikTok parent company ByteDance’s US TikTok business to an American-backed owner. A bipartisan bill passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden banned TikTok in the United States because of national security concerns, allowing the app to continue operating in America only if its China-based owner divested its stake in the US assets of the social media company.
TikTok briefly went dark in the United States on January 18, the day before the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect. But on January 19, one day before Trump took office for his second term, he said he would sign an executive action upon the beginning of his term that would ensure US companies would not be punished for hosting TikTok on their app stores or servers.
The executive order, signed on January 20, delayed for 75 days the enforcement of the law. Trump extended the deadline again in June. The deadline had most recently been extended to September 17, but Trump was widely expected to move the deadline again if a deal didn’t come together in time.
The law gives the president broad discretion on how to enforce the ban. But critics have said Trump’s extensions thwarted the will of Congress.
Trump toward the end of his first term had advocated for banning TikTok — a policy he never got passed but which Biden eventually supported and signed into law. But Trump’s opinion eventually changed after he viewed the social media app as contributing to his election victory in 2024.
TikTok boasts around 170 million US users, many of them young people – a contingent that offered significantly more support to the Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election than that segment of the population has in recent years. Trump has repeatedly said a deal is close, but no breakthrough emerged until Monday.
Who is buying TikTok?
Several investment groups have come forward in recent months saying that they would be interested in buying TikTok. Among the most prominent has been led by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, who have made several public pleas to own TikTok, and who made an offer to ByteDance.
But TikTok would likely cost more than the group can afford — likely in the tens of billions of dollars. So that group said it offered to purchase TikTok’s US assets without the app’s secret sauce: its algorithm that hooks users into watching video after video on the platform. They said they were convinced they could create a comparable algorithm from scratch.
That’s why industry analysts believe a much more likely candidate to buy TikTok’s US assets is Ellison, who has the capability of leading a group of investors with the money to buy the algorithm — and whose company already has a relationship with TikTok.
Oracle in 2020 began hosting TikTok’s US data, and it briefly reached a deal with the first Trump administration that year to buy TikTok, before that deal was ultimately blocked.
Trump has previously said he would seek a 50-50 joint venture between ByteDance and a new American owner. It has since been heavily debated whether any amount of Chinese ownership would be allowed by law, and the Trump administration didn’t clarify what kind of agreement it had secured on Monday.
China, up until this point, has been hesitant to allow ByteDance to give up its US stake. But as trade tensions between the companies reached an inflection point in the spring and continued throughout the summer – evidenced by China’s announcement Monday that Nvidia had violated its antitrust laws – Chinese authorities apparently decided that it should play ball.
Without a TikTok deal in place, a meeting between Trump and Xi wouldn’t be possible, US officials said. An agreement makes it more likely the two leaders will sit down when Trump visits Asia at the end of October, according to those officials.
Trump in late October and early November has an Asia trip planned, and their first in-person meeting of Trump’s second term could, in theory, take place then.
Trump on Monday hinted that a deal is now close.
“The big Trade Meeting in Europe between The United States of America, and China, has gone VERY WELL! It will be concluding shortly,” Trump said Monday in a post on Truth Social. “A deal was also reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save. They will be very happy! I will be speaking to President Xi on Friday.”
CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote characterizing the deal as fair for China while respecting US national security concerns. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer issued that statement.
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