#tiktok-ownership

#tiktok-ownership

TikTok will soon have new American oligarch overlords. If Donald Trump is to be believed, Lachlan Murdoch, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison are potential investors in a deal to keep the social-media giant in the United States. Trump has been actively thwarting legislation, signed into law under Joe Biden with bipartisan majorities, to force a sale to the U.S. because TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, which has close ties to the Chinese government.

Chinese President Xi and U.S. President Trump aren't talking face to face yet, but they are talking person to person on the phone. At this very moment, reports CNBC, a call is in progress to discuss whether China will permit a controlling interest in TikTok's U.S. operations to be sold to a consortium of U.S. companies led by Oracle ( NYSE: ORCL), and whether TikTok will be permitted to continue operating here - or forced to shut down.

Ultimately, China gets to keep the TikTok algorithm, simply licensing the algorithm to the US instead of handing over the heart of TikTok's success. As Ars previously reported, that means the US could end up with a glitchier version of TikTok, with sources telling WSJ that TikTok engineers will be forced to "re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms" for the US app if the deal goes through.