President Donald Trump named tech founder Michael Dell, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, when asked about the “American billionaires” lined up to take a stake in a U.S. version of TikTok.
The president named the three on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing,” which aired on Sept. 21.
“I think they’re going to be in the group. A couple of others. Really great people, very prominent people,” Trump said in the interview, recorded on Sept. 19. “And they’re also American patriots, you know, they love this country. I think they’re going to do a really good job.”
Trump also said Oracle and its CEO, Larry Ellison, would be involved in the deal.
Trump had announced a deal was approved on Sept. 19 after a two-hour call with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping, as Chinese export control laws had prevented ByteDance from selling TikTok without state oversight. He shared little about the terms of the deal but reiterated that the buyers were already lined up and the details already worked out.
On Sept. 20, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox that TikTok US would have seven board members, six of them Americans in the United States.
She said the deal was done and expected it to be signed “in the coming days.”
“TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm will be retrained from the ground up—reviewed and analyzed under U.S. supervision with U.S. data that will not be shared outside of the United States,” the official said. They added that the six American board members will have national security and cybersecurity credentials.
Leavitt said that cloud company Oracle will oversee the data and privacy aspects of TikTok US.
From November 2020 through August 2022, the U.S. government and subject matter experts had met with ByteDance and TikTok several times to discuss an alternative solution to divestment. ByteDance’s final proposal, dubbed “Project Texas,” had involved Oracle overseeing code security and data storage as well.
The proposal had other issues that the current deal aims to mitigate, as U.S. ownership of the venture would negate limits on overseeing operations.
Trump had called for U.S. ownership of TikTok in his first term, but his 2020 executive order was stayed by a court, and the Chinese regime passed export control laws that prohibited ByteDance from selling TikTok’s algorithm without state oversight.
