TikTok has reached a deal to sell parts of its US business. Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX are part of the consortium of new investors.
Who’s grabbing control of TikTok’s US assets?
On Thursday, TikTok told staffers it had signed a deal to form a joint venture for its US business with a group of investors, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Shou Chew, which was viewed by Business Insider. The company expects the deal to close in late January, per the memo.
Three managing investors will each hold a 15% stake in the new venture: Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX.
Five percent of the US company will go to an unnamed group of new investors, while ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, will maintain a 19.9% minority stake — the maximum allowed by the divest-or-ban law that spurred TikTok’s sale. The remaining 30.1% will be controlled by an undisclosed group of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo.
In September, President Donald Trump said Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle, would be involved in a $14 billion deal to buy TikTok’s US business. At the time, Trump mentioned billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell would also play a role, but it is unclear if they are involved in the current deal.
Oracle, which currently works with TikTok on data security, is expected to continue to be its „trusted security partner“ tasked with safeguarding „sensitive US user data“, Chew wrote in his memo to staffers.
TikTok’s new US owners will retrain the content recommendation algorithm on US user data „to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation“, per the memo.
