President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order approving a landmark divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations, transferring majority control to a newly formed U.S.-based joint venture. The decision ends months of political brinkmanship over the wildly popular app, which boasts nearly 170 million American users, and follows a bruising national security fight with Beijing-based parent company ByteDance Ltd.
Trump declared that the deal “adequately addresses national security concerns” raised by lawmakers and intelligence officials. His order emphasized that U.S. partners will control TikTok’s algorithms, source code and content-moderation powers, cutting off China’s direct influence over the platform.
ByteDance Reduced to Minority Role
According to the order, ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the new entity, while a coalition of American investors—reportedly including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz—is expected to take the dominant share.
Safeguards embedded in the deal mandate that all U.S. user data be housed on Oracle’s cloud servers, with rigorous government oversight of software updates, algorithmic adjustments and data flows.
“These safeguards,” Trump wrote, “will protect the American people from misuse of their data and foreign influence, while allowing creators and businesses that rely on TikTok to thrive.”
The divestiture extends beyond TikTok, also sweeping in ByteDance-owned apps Lemon8 and CapCut, which will now be subject to the same U.S. oversight.
