TikTok CEO Shou Chew has been invited to and is expected to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Monday, according to three sources familiar with the matter, two of whom are Trump transition officials.
Chew was invited by the president-elect's team and will sit on the dais in front of the Capitol where Trump will be sworn in as president.
Chew is expected to sit alongside the CEOs and leaders of other Big Tech platforms, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to one of the officials. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also planning to attend and sit with the other executives, one Trump transition official said.
NBC News has reached out to representatives of TikTok and Google for comment. TikTok declined to comment and Google did not immediately respond.
The New York Times was the first outlet to report about Chew’s inauguration attendance.
Chew’s attendance comes as the popular TikTok app is preparing to possibly shut down Sunday, the day a U.S. ban is set to go into effect if the Supreme Court doesn’t overrule it.
The nine justices on the conservative-majority court heard oral arguments last week about whether to implement the ban that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden last year. Remarks and questions by the justices during the arguments suggested it was likely they would uphold the law that would effectively ban the platform.
The law requires the China-based parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, to divest itself of the company. If a sale doesn't take place, the platform used by millions of Americans would “go dark,” the company’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, said.
Congress passed the legislation last year with strong bipartisan support, with many who voted in favor of the law arguing that they had concerns regarding data and national security because of China's involvement with the app.
The Biden administration, however, is weighing options that could keep TikTok available in the U.S. if the ban is instituted, NBC News reported Wednesday, and officials who are expected to join the second Trump administration are also signaling they want to delay a ban or find a work-around.
Trump's incoming White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said on Fox News on Wednesday that Trump would find a way to preserve the app and protect people’s data: “That’s the deal that will be in front of us" he said when asked about new reporting from The Washington Post that Trump was considering an executive order that would temporarily keep TikTok if it were banned by the Supreme Court. Trump's nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, also declined to say during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday whether she would enforce a TikTok ban if she is confirmed.
