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TikTok is more than an app. TikTok is an opportunity for President Donald Trump to bestow great wealth—and considerable media power—on a clique of allies and insiders. The details of this gift are taking shape out of the public eye. By the time the specifics become available, it will likely be too late to change them.
In 2024, Congress ordered TikTok’s parent corporation to divest its U.S. operations or face a U.S. ban. The Trump administration delayed enforcing the law, but on September 25, the White House issued an executive order to set a plan in motion. Important details of this plan remain undisclosed, but what has been released should alarm anyone concerned about this administration’s drive to consolidate wealth and media power in the hands of a loyal few.
[Damon Beres: Billions of people in the palm of Trump’s hand]
Given what’s at stake, Americans deserve answers to the following questions:
Will the as-yet-unnamed U.S. buyers of TikTok be paying the full market price?
The White House is apparently valuing TikTok’s U.S. business at $14 billion, 1.4 times its annual U.S. revenue. That’s a shockingly low figure for a thriving tech operation. As Bloomberg News reported, YouTube’s parent corporation, Alphabet, is valued at eight times its revenue. Instagram’s parent, Meta, is valued at 10 times its revenue. The buzz among investors is that TikTok in the U.S. should be worth about $40 billion, perhaps more.
Why was the price of TikTok’s U.S. operations set so cheap, relatively speaking? If Trump is undervaluing TikTok, the lucky investors who gain ownership of it may be in for a massive and immediate windfall.
How is the Trump administration choosing these lucky buyers?
TikTok’s U.S. business is not being auctioned to the highest bidder. Trump has casually thrown out the names of people he might invite to make this investment, such as the media moguls Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Dell’s Michael Dell, but he has yet to make public the complete roster of this purchasing group. The main criterion for inclusion seems to be fealty to Trump. The Murdoch family may have little experience managing advanced-tech companies, but Trump made sure to invite them for what promises to be a massive giveaway of wealth and power.
Will the Trump administration control TikTok’s content?
At a press conference at Mar a Lago in December 2024, President-Elect Trump was asked whether he would enforce a 2024 law requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. assets or face a nationwide ban. He seemed reluctant to commit. “I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” he answered, explaining that he believed the site had helped him reach young voters: “We won youth.”
The TikTok deal will reportedly transfer control of its valuable algorithm to Trump’s handpicked group of investors. What this means remains hazy. How much power will the company’s new owners have over what users see? Given this uncertainty, it is troubling that Trump seems to be granting these owners a hugely undervalued asset—for which they will presumably feel they owe him something in return.
Reports on the murky TikTok deal suggest that investors will also be expected to pay a multibillion-dollar fee to the U.S. government—the latest in a series of Trump-administration deals that demand payments from the private sector. Depending on how this fee is extracted, it could put yet more power into Trump’s hands. The administration might go easy on investors by backloading fee payments, or squeeze them by accelerating payment demands. However the fee is structured, its burden threatens to grant Trump yet more personal influence over the future of TikTok in the U.S.
This influence may extend to TikTok’s content creators, too. The company’s new owners will inherit from ByteDance the power to direct large income flows toward some creators—and to penalize others. On October 6, Trump took to TikTok to deliver a personal message to “all of those young people of TikTok”: “I saved TikTok, so you owe me big.”
Will this deal make the personal data of American users any more secure?
A big concern about the Chinese ownership of TikTok has been that Beijing might harvest Americans’ data for nefarious purposes. A curious detail about the Trump deal is that it seems to make no substantive changes to the way that users’ data will be collected and stored.
ByteDance has insisted that it resolved safety concerns in 2022 with a deal to store U.S. data on servers managed by Oracle, a tech company co-founded by Ellison, a friend and close supporter of Trump. Critics worried that these safeguards were insufficient, arguing that it’s not possible to sever TikTok’s U.S. operations from the larger Chinese-owned platform, and that the technology is too complicated to verify the security of the Oracle solution. The Trump deal essentially keeps this arrangement in place.
Has China really surrendered control of TikTok in the U.S.?
Among the many hazy details of this deal is what role ByteDance will play in this future version of TikTok in the U.S.
According to what’s been made public, TikTok’s Chinese parent company will continue to own about 20 percent of the new venture, and it will lease to it access to TikTok’s powerful recommendations algorithm: the formula that makes the platform so addictive and lucrative. What remains unanswered is whether ByteDance will be able to set limits on just how much the company’s U.S. owners can modify this formula.
The trade war between China and the U.S. may also influence what compromises Trump is willing to grant ByteDance. Might he allow the Chinese company more control over the U.S. algorithm if it means American farmers can sell soybeans to Chinese customers again?
A truly worrying aspect of the whole TikTok deal has been the absence of oversight. Republican members of Congress responsible for managing the China relationship have been left to beg for fragments of information. With the House recessed during the government shutdown, and with the Senate paralyzed by fights over the budget, nobody seems to have an eye on the Trump TikTok plan.
[Allison Stanger: The difference between TikTok and free expression]
The current deadline for the deal is December 16. That does not leave much time to get answers to these pressing questions, if lawmakers are moved even to ask them. It’s all too easy to predict yet more silence as the president plots ways to further enrich and empower his friends.
