President Donald Trump and his administration will be receiving a massive payout from TikTok to keep the video-based app operating in the U.S.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to collect $10 billion from investors two months after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, reached an agreement to establish a joint venture with a majority American ownership. The deal will keep TikTok from being unavailable in the U.S., an outcome that seemed likely once a law banning it domestically was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision last January. The administration’s pay will be for brokering the deal.
Companies investing in the popular app include United Arab Emirates investment firm MGX, cloud-based software platform Oracle, and global tech business Silver Lake. When the deal concluded in January, those businesses, in addition to other backers, paid $2.5 billion and will continue payments until $10 billion is fulfilled. ByteDance will retain its 19.9 percent stake.
The executive order was signed by President Trump last September, when he asserted that TikTok “is going to be American operated all the way.”
“The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus — I call it a fee-plus — just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window,” Trump stated at the time, per The Times.
