- NPR claim to have intel on a new plan for Oracle to be part-buyers in TikTok
- The President is denying any knowledge, but Congressional staffers are less tight-lipped
- At press time, TikTok is still unavailable on Google and Apple's app stores due to imminent ban
Oracle could be next in line to take over ownership of embattled social media giant TikTok from ByteDance, if new reports are to be believed.
An NPR exclusive, fuelled by correspondence with “two people with direct knowledge of the talks”, claims that a murky deal involving the cloud storage titan is in the early stages; albeit complicated by President Trump’s own desires for the US itself to have a 50% equity stake in the company, and “a group of outside investors”, including Microsoft, also showing interest.
The new deliberations offer TikTok a stay of execution after it was supposed to have been banned in the US in the event of no plan for a sale to American buyers being in place (a process known as qualified divestiture), thanks to a law passed by Congress in April 2024.
Oracle TikTok deal?
Given the speculation, it’s no surprise President Trump reportedly refused to comment when asked about prospective talks supposedly held with Oracle chief Larry Ellison about the deal, meaning ultimately, we just don’t know all that much about the plan - yet.
One of NPR’s sources, however, did claim, at present, the deal would give the US direct oversight over TikTok as a platform, but that ByteDance ”wouldn’t completely go away”.
Though the original deadline for a sale to occur before a ban was January 19, 2025, the newly-sitting President signed an executive order that provided a 75-day extension - despite the contention of legal scholars.
Though TikTok service is still operational in the US as a result of the order, Google and Apple have both delisted it from their respective mobile app stores, most likely to toe the line of the law.
A Congressional staffer involved in the talks said that "a key part [of the new deal winning approval despite passing a deadline] is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance [...] there needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access."
White House negotiators are reportedly under the impression that TikTok could well be worth $200 billion USD, so perhaps it’s no surprise that certain forces want to keep the deal alive.
Plus, Chinese opposition to TikTok’s sale is thought to have eased recently as thoughts turn to it being used as a bargaining chip to relieve trade tariffs; a stance that would appear to make a deal going through that much more likely.
Oracle, meanwhile, has its own well-established interests in a deal. In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024, it claimed a TikTok ban could hurt the cloud giant's business, as ByteDance is a customer and, in June 2022, moved its US user data to Oracle servers after initial concerns were raised about its data-handling practices in the territory.
This isn’t the first time tech giants such as Microsoft and Oracle have been named as part of prospective deals that would transfer TikTok to American ownership; in August 2020, both companies, plus such names as Walmart, Google and Twitter were named as part of a deal that could have turned the app into a creator-oriented ecommerce platform.
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