Oracle-Led Group Takes Majority of TikTok U.S. Assets (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: TikTok has finalized a deal to allow its American business to continue operating. The app was due to be banned in the U.S. this month if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, failed to sell its operations in the country to U.S. investors. So let's get the latest on this breaking story now with our technology correspondent, Lily Jamali. Lily, it's great to see you. What more do we know about this deal and the investors involved?

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: Well, a lot of what we're learning today is information that had been floated in recent weeks. But we knew that today was going to be the closing date on this deal, and now it is confirmed. So we can say with certainty now that the U.S. assets of TikTok are now held, majority held, by Oracle, the cloud computing giant, which is run by Larry Ellison, as we've talked about before, a close political ally of Donald Trump's. Other entities that are going to be taking part in this purchase include MGX, which is an Emirati investment firm. And when you look down the list of who is going to be on the board of this new U.S. entity, there's a lot of investment firms, Silverlake, TPG, Susquehanna International, and others. What this announcement today does is finally kind of put to rest all the uncertainty that has been clouding TikTok here in the United States with its 200 now million users, puts that uncertainty to rest. This U.S. entity is now in the hands, majority hands, of American investors.

[00:01:29] Speaker 1: And Lily, remind us the background to all of this, the ban that we saw put in place and how President Trump has reacted. Right.

[00:01:36] Speaker 2: So this all stemmed from a law that was passed overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis by Congress in 2024. It was signed into law by then President Joe Biden. And the Supreme Court actually stepped in, you might remember, early last year and unanimously upheld this law that required ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to either sell TikTok's U.S. assets or to see the app banned. Donald Trump coming into office really scrambled the equation. He has four times now, I believe, extended the deadline that was supposed to first kick in last January, all along saying that there was some sort of deal in the works. As we were getting closer to today, we were starting to get more and more of the contours of that deal. We should note ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, will still remain a stakeholder in this new U.S. entity, but it will have less than the 20% that is required under that law.