The yearslong battle over TikTok’s ownership has concluded in a $10 billion windfall for the Trump administration. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors in the recently completed deal to create a US-controlled TikTok will pay the government the exorbitant sum for its role in helping broker the transaction. The fee is about 70 percent of the new US TikTok’s $14 billion valuation.
Finalized in January, the TikTok deal concludes a saga that began in 2019, when US politicians began raising alarms about the Chinese-owned app’s potential threat to national security. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban.
But Trump—despite being the first president to attempt such a ban—made “saving TikTok” one of his focal points in his second term, recognizing the app’s appeal with young voters. Trump’s solution? Transfer ownership of TikTok’s US operations to an American investor group led by one of his billionaire allies, Larry Ellison.
Critics have raised concerns that the Trump-brokered TikTok sale would enrich the president’s allies.
Ellison is the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Oracle, which now holds an ownership stake and board seat in US TikTok. Private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati artificial intelligence investment company MGX are also lead investors, while ByteDance retains a 19.9 percent stake, the most permitted by law.
Critics have raised concerns that the Trump-brokered TikTok sale would enrich the president’s allies. Ellison—one of the richest men in the world—hosted a $100,000-per-person fundraising dinner for Trump in 2020. His son, David, has used his recent acquisition of Paramount Skydance as an opportunity to push CBS News to the right. (The Ellison family might soon add CNN to its media empire, a prospect that seems to thrill the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently crowed to reporters, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”) MGX, meanwhile, has used the Trump family’s World Liberty cryptocurrency to make a hefty investment in the crypto exchange Binance.
Now, with this $10 billion fee, it’s clear that the TikTok arrangement will be mutually beneficial. As the Journal reports, for advising on similar deals, investment bankers typically receive fees of less than 1 percent of the transaction value. Bank of America, for instance, is receiving $130 million for advising a $71.5 billion Norfolk Southern deal. That’s one of the largest transaction fees on record for a bank—and still remarkably lower than the Trump administration’s payout.
Administration officials told the Journal that the fee accurately reflects Trump’s role in preserving TikTok’s US operations while addressing lawmakers’ security concerns. When reached by the New York Times, spokespeople for Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake either declined to comment or did not respond.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.