After years of litigation, arguments, and presidential administration changes, the U.S. and China have officially struck a deal: the U.S. version of TikTok is finally being sold.
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CBS’s Face the Nation that the two countries have “reached a final deal on TikTok.”
“We reached one in Madrid, and I believe that as of today, all the details are ironed out, and that will be for the two leaders to consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea,” Bessent said.
He added that while he is “not part of the commercial side of the transaction,” he was responsible for getting the Chinese government “to agree to approve the transaction, and I believe we successfully accomplished that over the past two days.”
This comes about a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the new TikTok deal met the requirements of the 2024 law that banned TikTok from operating in the U.S. At the time, Vice President JD Vance said the deal values the U.S. TikTok assets at $14 billion, as Deadline reported.
The new deal means that data for U.S. users will be managed by Oracle; the U.S. algorithm would be controlled domestically; and TikTok’s U.S. operations would be under the control of a board of directors likely including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Fox Corp, Andreessen Horowitz, and Silver Lake Management, according to TechCrunch.
