Tik tok...tik tok...tik tok...

Donald Trump's deadline for China-owned Byte Dance to sell off its US TikTok operation has been extended, again. This time, to allow the US President's tech friends time to get their ducks in a row to buy off the American assets of the hugely popular social media company that was closed down briefly in January 2025, just a day before Trump’s inauguration, after a bipartisan Congressional ban in May 2024. Trump had tried and failed to ban Tik Tok during his first term, but has since developed a “warm spot in his heart” for it when the platform boosted his appeal amongst young American voters in the 2024 election.   

Chinese and American negotiators have now agreed on a framework that would see TikTok America sold off from its Chinese parent company to a consortium of shareholders, most of them Trump donors. But it’s not just the buyers who make the deal controversial, though that in itself is staggering. It’s also that, unusually, the Vice President, JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, was deployed to stitch the deal together. Then there’s the price tag. Trump’s tech friends will be getting a staggeringly good deal, buying the video-based platform with 1.59 billion monthly users globally for a mere $US14 billion. Tik Tok makes $US10 billion a year in advertising revenue; social media valuations routinely run at 10-time multiples of sales revenue. Take Twitter for example; when Elon Musk bought it for $US54 billion in 2022, its advertising revenue was just $US2.5 billion.  

The deal is not just a financial boon for its new investors. It is a political asset for Donald Trump, given TikTok has 170 million US users and is said to have an outsized influence on public discourse on politics, culture and even business. When the platform fell silent in January, albeit only for 24 hours before Trump reversed the measure, influencers and businesses alike were left scrambling for alternative ways to connect.  

The new owners will lease the infamously successful TikTok algorithm from ByteDance. And handily, oversight of the algorithm and data protection will be managed by consortium member Oracle, owned by Larry Ellison, one of Donald Trump’s most significant donors. In the consortium mix as well is Australia’s very own ‘American patriot’ Rupert Murdoch whose Wall Street Journal is being sued by Trump over the publication of a 2003 birthday card signed by the President to convicted sex offender Jeffry Epstein. The card included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to shared secrets, the reporting of which the Murdochs have vowed to defend, though the Tik Tok deal might see the lawsuit quietly disappear.

The concerns which occupied the minds of those sitting in the US Congress when they passed the TikTok ban – about Beijing’s potential to collect data on and unduly influence the American public – seem to have given way in Trump 2.0 to a desire for a deal that will have significant financial positives for the president’s backers and more critically, significant political influence over the platform’s largely young audience. 

References:

https://www.theverge.com/23651507/tiktok-ban-us-news

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/trump-s-tiktok-deal-a-21b-bargain-for-his-billionaire-mates-20250930-p5myvk.html

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-22/tiktok-deal-involves-murdoch-trump-says/105800256

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-21/us-house-tiktok-ban-vote-over-china-security-concerns/103749808

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-executive-order-to-suspend-tiktok-ban-for-75-days-to-find-u-s-buyer

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-19/trump-epstein-grand-jury-release-maga-backlash/105549624

https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-facts-statistics/