President Donald Trump said in an interview there is a “buyer for TikTok,” teasing an announcement to come in “about two weeks.”
“We have a buyer for TikTok by the way. I think I’ll need probably China approval, and I think President Xi will probably do it,” the president said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
Asked who the buyer is going to be, Trump said, “I’ll tell you in about two weeks.”
“It’s a group of very wealthy people,” the president added.
It’s been about five months since a law requiring TikTok to be banned in the United States unless it was sold off by its China-based parent company, ByteDance, technically went into effect.
But thanks to President Donald Trump’s promises not to enforce the law, neither of those things have happened, aside from an approximately 14-hour blackout in January.
Trump has instead signed three orders delaying enforcement on the ban.
As a June 19 deadline to enforce the sale-or-ban law approached earlier this month, Trump granted TikTok a 90-day extension. The deadline for its parent company ByteDance to hand over control of TikTok’s US operations is now September 17.
The delay raised questions about the status of a deal that could secure TikTok’s long-term future in the US. The Chinese government has offered little public indication that it would be willing to approve a sale beyond suggesting that any deal could not include TikTok’s “algorithm,” which has been called the app’s secret sauce.
In April, a deal that would have transferred majority control of TikTok’s US operations to American ownership was nearly finalised.
But it fell apart after Trump announced additional tariffs on China, forcing the president to announce another 75-day delay to keep the app operational in the United States.
“There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law,” TikTok parent company ByteDance said after Trump’s tariff policy stalled progress on the deal in April.
Former president Joe Biden last year signed the sale-or-ban law last year to go into effect January 19. TikTok briefly took itself offline, sparking outcry from creators, but quickly came back after Trump signed his first order delaying the ban’s enforcement by 75 days. It was one of his first acts as president, made in hopes of reaching a deal to keep the app “alive.”
