UPDATED 13:10 EST / SEPTEMBER 21 2020

POLICY

Trump signals ByteDance must offload TikTok stake or deal won’t be approved

The effort to reach a deal that would salvage the U.S. operations of TikTok took another turn today after President Donald Trump signaled a deal would be approved only if TikTok parent’s company, ByteDance Ltd., offloaded its entire stake in the app.

TikTok is a popular video sharing app with about 100 million users across the country and many more worldwide. In August, the White House said ByteDance, which is based in China, must sell the U.S. operations of TikTok or the app would be blocked stateside. 

On Saturday, the Washington Post and other publications cited TikTok as saying that ByteDance has agreed to sell a 20% stake in TikTok to Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. in a bid to fulfill the White House’s conditions and avoid a U.S. ban. On Sunday, Trump told reporters that “I have given the deal my blessing. If they get it done, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s okay, too.”

But today, Trump commented on Oracle and Walmart’s TikTok stakes by saying that “if we find that they don’t have total control, then we’re not going to approve the deal.” In other words, the 20% stake in TikTok that Oracle and Walmart were on Saturday reported to have agreed to buy may not be sufficient to get the deal cleared.

There’s somewhat more clarity around the other terms of the proposed transactions. Oracle and Walmart have reportedly agreed with ByteDance to move the stateside operations of TikTok into a new U.S.-based firm, TikTok Global, and the plan would be to have this new firm go public within a year. But there’s currently uncertainty around who will end up owning how much of TikTok Global.

Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck said in a statement that “upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.”

In the absence of a deal acceptable to the White House, TikTok will remain accessible to users who have the app installed on their devices until at least Nov. 12. However, it will no longer be available to download starting Friday if an agreement is not reached.

Trump’s back-and-forth positioning on the deal — especially his insistence that the government be paid billions of dollars for the deal — has come in for considerable criticism. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, customarily a supporter of Trump, late Sunday criticized the deal as “crony capitalism” because Oracle executives Larry Ellison and Safra Catz have been Trump supporters.

Photo: Unsplash

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