TikTok company offices in Culver City, California. on September 30, 2025. An agreement was signed on December 18 to sell the US part of the company to a group of US investors.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
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Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
TikTok has signed a deal to spin off its US operations to a group mostly controlled by American investors, including software giant Oracle, a company run by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison.
TikTok’s hyper-engaging algorithm and the massive amount of data the app has collected on millions of Americans will be monitored by the American startup. Under the agreement, TikTok’s American algorithm will be retrained solely on American data. Content moderation rules on what is allowed and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity.
However, the underlying algorithm will remain owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with the blessing of U.S. auditors, according to an internal TikTok memo reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly.
“With an American majority in charge of content moderation, concerns about foreign propaganda appear to have eased,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who studies the regulation of new technologies. “But it’s possible that US TikTok could end up censoring or hiding speech that is allowed on the global TikTok platform. I would expect the US content moderation team to allow speech that US owners don’t like.”
Under the terms of the sale, half of the new entity that will control the US version of TikTok will be owned by a consortium of investors that will include Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and United Arab Emirates state investment firm MGX. Those three will control 45% of the new American entity TikTok.
Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX did not respond to requests for comment.
About a third of the newly formed TikTok operation will be held by existing investors in ByteDance, the video app’s Chinese parent company. And ByteDance will keep about 20%.
A seven-member board of directors, most of them Americans, will oversee the new entity, according to the memo, which was first reported by Axios.
The deal ends more than five years of mounting pressure from Washington, where bipartisan concerns about TikTok’s ties to China led Congress to pass a law in 2024 that would have banned the app unless it was sold.
The law was upheld by the Supreme Court in January. For months, TikTok was technically operating in violation of federal law, but Trump issued a series of executive actions to delay enforcement of the law that would have banned the popular video app.
Jim Secreto, a former Treasury official who worked on TikTok policy during the Biden administration, said the deal signed Tuesday does not completely sever ties with ByteDance, something the law passed by Congress was intended to put in place.
“The law requires a complete break with ByteDance. This structure does not meet that standard,” Secreto said. “It looks more like a franchise deal that leaves TikTok’s core technology in China than a true divestment. By circumventing barriers put in place by Congress, national security concerns around covert data access and algorithm manipulation remain unresolved.”
The White House declined to comment.
TikTok is estimated to have 2 billion users worldwide, and less than 10% of its worldwide users are located in the US.
A new US entity overseeing the US version creates a curious situation for the viral video app: One version of the service will be run by a US-backed company, with additional checks and balances on content streams and data security, while a second version of the app, fully operated by ByteDance, will be available to the rest of the world.
The deal represents a major victory for Larry Ellison, expanding his family’s control into more corners of American media and entertainment.
Ellison is a major sponsor of Paramount Skydance, a deal that was completed this year.
His son, David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance, has made a hostile bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, just as streaming giant Netflix has made its own bid, which top Warner officials have backed.