The US operations of TikTok will be majority-owned and controlled by Americans under a deal reached this week to spin off the platform from its Chinese ownership, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
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Speaking on Fox News, Leavitt said on Saturday that Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok and that the video app’s algorithm would be US-controlled. She added the final deal would be signed in the coming days.
Talks earlier this week between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Madrid yielded a framework agreement for spinning off ByteDance Ltd.’s US TikTok operations. Details of that framework had yet to be made public. President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok’s divestiture until December 16. Congress passed a bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to divest of TikTok by January 2025.
“So all of those details have already been agreed upon, now we just need this deal to be signed and that will be happening, I anticipate, in the coming days,” Leavitt said.
The TikTok arrangement would see ByteDance hold no more than 20 per cent, with new investors including Oracle Corp, Andreessen Horowitz and private equity firm Silver Lake Management LLC, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said this week that it would be “owned by all-American investors” and “companies that love America,” but sidestepped a question about whether the app would require a new algorithm.
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“The data and privacy will be led by one of America’s greatest tech companies, Oracle, and the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well,” Leavitt said.