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Investors in the joint-venture are said to include enterprise software and cloud computing services company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, Dell CEO Michael Dell, and Fox Corp. The company’s board of directors will be made up of mostly Americans. The current owner of TikTok, China’s Byte Dance, is expected to keep a 20% stake in the app. The White House said that Oracle will be in charge of the app’s algorithm and data.

The joint-venture has a valuation estimated at $14 billion

During the signing of the executive order, Vice President J.D. Vance said that the U.S. joint-venture will have a valuation of around $14 billion. Previous estimates of the valuation of TikTok’s U.S. assets were in a range between $20 billion and $100 billion depending on the inclusion of TikTok’s algorithm. The latter uses things like the type of videos you normally watch, videos you like, share, and comment on, and other factors to decide which videos you see on your feed.

Screenshot of the TikTok app for iOS. | Image credit-PhoneArena

There are quite a few questions that will need to be answered. For example, will U.S. users have to install a separate U.S. TikTok app? There are also concerns about the content that the app may show especially since the investor group buying TikTok includes several Trump allies. Interestingly, right after accusing Jimmy Kimmel of telling 99% of his jokes against the Republicans, a situation which the president said made ABC an arm of the Democratic National Committee leading the president to threaten a lawsuit against ABC, Trump said that he would love TikTok’s algorithm to be “100% MAGA.”

Trump, Vance make it clear that post-deal, TikTok will not stream only MAGA propaganda

However, at the end of the day, both the president and vice president made it clear that TikTok won’t be a propaganda mouthpiece for the MAGA movement. In fact. you have to give both of them credit for their comments making this clear. “If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would, but it’s not going to work out that way,” Trump said. “Everyone is going to be treated fairly, every group, every philosophy.”

The Vice President said, “We want the business to make decisions about content based on the interest of the business and based on the interest of the users, and that’s what we think will happen.” Let’s hope they are both being honest about this.

Regulatory agencies will have to sign off on the deal before it closes. One important approval was received as Trump commented on his call last week with China’s President Xi Jinping. “I had a very good talk with [Chinese] President Xi, and we talked about TikTok and other things, but we talked about TikTok and he gave us the go-ahead.” That call took place last Friday.

When you think about, did Trump really changed his mind on TikTok?

I’ll admit it. I was one of those in the media who said that Trump had changed his opinion from his first term when he wanted to ban TikTok and that he changed his mind after his son Barron explained how the app could deliver the youth vote to him. But the truth is that even during the first term, Trump’s goal was to get TikTok into American hands. And now he is on the verge of making this happen.

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