President Donald Trump is expected to sign a deal Thursday to facilitate the sale of TikTok from a Chinese-based company to a group of American investors, two senior White House officials told NBC News.
Members of the Trump administration have signaled for days that a deal was being finalized between Chinese and U.S. officials.
A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that once the deal was implemented, TikTok's U.S. operations would be run by a new joint-venture company. ByteDance, TikTok's current China-based owner, will hold less than 20% of the stock of the new company, the official said.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The structure would comply with a bipartisan law passed in 2024 that sought to ban TikTok if it wasn't sold to U.S.-based owners this year. The app briefly shut down in the United States in January, just a day before Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
The app came back online in the United States after Trump promised not to enforce the penalties against TikTok that were in the law and said he would seek to make a deal with China for the platform's sale to the United States.
Trump has extended the deadline to avoid a ban several times this year. A senior White House official said Wednesday that he plans to extend the pause for 120 more days to allow time for the deal to go through.
For years, technology experts and U.S. officials warned that TikTok, which has over 170 million U.S. users, was a national security risk and that ByteDance could give the Chinese government access to user data and to the app's algorithm.
During his first term, Trump signed an executive order in 2020 aimed at banning TikTok, but then-President Joe Biden reversed it the following year. Biden ultimately signed the bipartisan TikTok bill into law.
On Wednesday, a senior White House official confirmed that as part of the deal, American users' data will be stored in the United States and overseen by the software and cloud computing company Oracle. They added that the platform's algorithm will be retrained and continuously monitored to ensure that U.S. content is free from any outside manipulation.
On Saturday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that the deal was almost over the finish line and that the “deal just needs to be signed.”
She added that the deal would create a board to oversee TikTok with six seats reserved for American investors but did not say who they would be.
Trump told Fox News in an interview Sunday that Oracle's co-founder Larry Ellison would play a role in the deal. He also said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, and the Murdoch family, which owns a media empire that includes News Corp. and Fox Corp., would play a role.
Trump added that the other business leaders involved in the deal are "really great people, very prominent people."
“And they’re also American patriots, you know, they love this country, so I think they’re going to do a really good job,” he added.
