Following a report by NPR that the Trump administration is working on a deal with Oracle and other investors to take over TikTok in the US, Trump denied any talks with Oracle, but said he has “talked to a lot of people about TikTok” and could make a decision within the next month, Reuters reports. Shortly after taking office on Monday, Trump signed an executive order delaying the implementation of the TikTok ban for 75 days, giving the app’s parent company, ByteDance, more time to find a deal that will allow it to continue operating in the United States.
NPR, citing sources “with direct knowledge of the talks,” first reported that Oracle met with White House officials on Friday to discuss a deal in which Oracle and other U.S. investors would take a controlling stake in TikTok and control things like data collection. According to NPR, Microsoft has also joined the talks. “The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and control what happens with TikTok,” an unnamed source told NPR. “ByteDance won’t disappear completely, but it will minimize Chinese ownership.”
However, when asked by reporters about a potential deal with Oracle during an Air Force One flight on Saturday night, Trump said, according to Reuters: “No, not with Oracle. A lot of people are talking to me, very significant people, about buying it, and I will make that decision probably within the next 30 days.”
Before the ban went into effect on January 19, ByteDance opposed the idea of selling TikTok to appease U.S. lawmakers. But on Sunday, it changed its stance after Trump intervened to temporarily bring the app back online, posting a statement on its TikTok X account saying that the company “will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that will keep TikTok in the United States.”
This came hours after Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he “would like the United States to have 50% of the joint venture” during the short-term TikTok outage. However, his exact plan remains unclear. According to one NPR source, “nobody seems to know what he means by a 50 percent stake.”
