On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that negotiators from the U.S. and China had agreed on a “framework” for a deal that would give an American company control of TikTok. And while most people assumed we would hear about the details this week, we’ve arrived at Friday, and it’s still unclear what might be happening with the video-sharing platform.
President Donald Trump held a call with President Xi Jinping of China on Friday to discuss a range of topics. Trump mentioned TikTok twice in a new Truth Social post Friday about the call, but anyone trying to read between the lines on what it means for ownership of the TikTok brand is going to struggle.
“I just completed a very productive call with President Xi of China. We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal,” Trump wrote in his typically unusual style.
“I also agreed with President Xi that we would meet at the APEC Summit in South Korea, that I would go to China in the early part of next year, and that President Xi would, likewise, come to the United States at an appropriate time,” Trump continued.
“The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!” Trump wrote.
And that’s it. No proclamation about some U.S.-based company like Oracle taking charge of TikTok. No bragging about how he got a great deal that would’ve been impossible under Biden. He didn’t even hint at the U.S. government taking a stake and how much control he would be able to wield under such an arrangement. All we got was “appreciate the TikTok approval,” which leaves so many questions.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz were all working together to take an 80% stake in TikTok. The newspaper explained that the new company controlling U.S. TikTok would have an “American-dominated board,” with one board member appointed by the Trump regime. But we can assume that whatever is getting hashed out between Oracle and Chinese leadership at TikTok hasn’t been agreed on yet. Because, again, there’s nothing Trump loves more than taking credit for a deal.
The road for TikTok has been a bumpy one in the U.S. ever since Trump signed an executive order trying to ban the social media platform during his first term. That got tied up in the courts and fizzled out during the early years of Biden’s presidency.
But then Congress passed a law in 2024, signed by Biden, that said Bytedance would be required to sell TikTok to U.S. interests or be banned entirely in the U.S. The first deadline for that to happen was Jan. 19, the day before Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Trump promised not to enforce the law, and then, when he properly got into office, that deadline was extended until April. Trump signed an executive order extending it again until June. And that was extended still another time until Sept. 17.
Trump signed another order this week extending the deadline until Dec. 16. None of this seems to be legal, according to most legal experts. You can’t just ignore a law indefinitely and sign executive orders to make it happen. When Congress passes a law, it needs to be implemented. As Politico put it, “the whole situation has no apparent precedent in the annals of American law.”
It’s not even clear that any deal currently being cooked up would adhere to the 2024 law as written. Chinese officials said this week that the deal they’re working on includes China “licensing the [TikTok] algorithm and other intellectual property rights,” according to the Financial Times. But it’s precisely that algorithm that the law passed by Congress is worried about for “national security” reasons.
And it sounds like any deal would also require U.S. users to migrate to a new app, though we don’t know what that would look like either. Trump only pulled a 180 on TikTok back in March 2024 during the lead-up to the presidential election. And he insists that it’s because young people on the platform love him. It’s surely a coincidence that Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass, a billionaire with a big investment in ByteDance, was reportedly in Trump’s ear right around the same time.
What’s next? We don’t know. But given the vibes coming from the White House right now, a deal doesn’t feel imminent. That could change, but there’s no real pressure to get something done quickly, now that Trump has extended the deadline again until December. And if he’s extended it a fourth time with no real pushback from Congress, there’s no reason to think he couldn’t go for number five.
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