On September 25, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that formally clears a pathway for TikTok’s U.S. operations to be transferred into American-controlled hands, delaying enforcement of the 2024 divestiture law to allow the deal to proceed. The White House framed the order as a win for national security and a way to save a popular platform while removing Chinese control over U.S. user data.
Under the outline Trump approved, a new U.S. joint venture would house TikTok’s American business with major investors including Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake, and the deal has been publicly pegged at roughly $14 billion by administration officials. Reports also name prominent technology and media figures as involved, signaling that established American companies will steward the platform moving forward.
Crucially, the agreement reportedly leaves ByteDance with less than a 20 percent stake and only one board seat, while Oracle is slated to run cloud and security operations and U.S. partners will retrain and monitor recommendation models to keep American data under American control. These are the kinds of hard, enforceable changes conservatives have demanded for years — not knee-jerk bans but practical steps to secure sensitive information.
Predictably, the usual Washington chorus is raising alarms about conflicts and the optics of who benefits from the arrangement, but opposition shouldn’t be a smokescreen for wanting a thumb on the scales that keeps the app blocked or cedes our data to Beijing. Skepticism is healthy; obstructionism is not. The American people want their data protected and their kids’ screens safe without capitulating to foreign influence or throwing away platforms that innovators and entrepreneurs use every day.
That said, the presence of foreign investment vehicles in parts of the proposed ownership structure — reports point to a stake by the Abu Dhabi-based MGX fund — means conservatives who care about sovereignty must remain vigilant and insist on real transparency. A deal that merely reshuffles paper ownership without cutting off covert influence would be a betrayal of the whole purpose of the law.
This administration’s approach strikes a balance between patriotism and pragmatism: protect Americans’ data, keep a major platform open, and put trusted companies in charge of security. Congress and the courts should not be sidelined — they must exercise oversight, demand clear timelines and verifiable safeguards, and ensure the retraining of algorithms and custody of data are ironclad. If the deal delivers on those guarantees, it will be a conservative victory for national security and for technological leadership; if it doesn’t, it must be unwound without hesitation.
