The US did not execute it’s Saturday deadline for TikTok to go dark or be sold to US investors, thanks to another Trump executive order
As the April 5 deadline for ByteDance to divest of the majority of its shares in TikTok in the US passed on Friday, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was signing an executive order to keep TikTok up and running for another 75 days.
“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’,” he said in a post. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
Any potential deal to buy TikTok shares from ByteDance will require approval from China, and Trump told the press pool on Friday aboard Air Force One that he believed the high tariffs imposed on China had delayed any such approval.
The Trump administration is working on a deal with potential investors to ensure that TikTok in the US be majority US-owned, after US lawmakers passed a bill in 2024 ordering TikTok to separate its US assets from Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a ban in the country.
The original deadline for divestment was 19 January, but a previous Trump executive order extended the deadline, allowing potential US investors to get their houses in order with investment proposals, and time for China to approve such a deal. Now they have an extra 75 days to do so.
Last week, US venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz added its name to the list of likely investors, including Blackstone and Oracle, looking to purchase a large stake in the Chinese-owned video app TikTok.
Bloomberg News had reported that a deal including these three was approaching completion, in a proposal that would see ByteDance retain around 20pc of TikTok in the US, existing US investors about 30pc and the new investors would hold the remaining 50pc.
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