On December 15, 2025, the fate of TikTok in the United States reached a new and uncertain crossroads, as President Donald Trump announced that a "very wealthy group of people" had agreed to buy the wildly popular social media platform from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. With roughly 170 million American users, TikTok’s future remains a subject of heated debate, legal wrangling, and international intrigue, drawing in everyone from tech titans to world leaders.
The drama began in earnest after the U.S. Supreme Court, less than a year ago, upheld a law that banned TikTok in the United States. As reported by The Guardian, the ruling effectively handed the federal government the power to force TikTok offline at any moment—an extraordinary authority that many legal scholars have called an affront to the First Amendment. The court’s decision, which cited national security concerns, has already come under intense scrutiny for what critics say is an overreach. "Judicial opinions allowing the government to suppress speech in the name of national security rarely stand the test of time," wrote Evelyn Douek in The Guardian, adding that the ruling’s deference to the government’s arguments was "spectacularly misplaced."
So, why all the fuss? At the heart of the controversy are fears that TikTok’s data collection practices and its ties to a "foreign adversary"—in this case, China—pose a national security risk. According to STV News, U.S. officials have warned that the Chinese government could access vast amounts of sensitive user data and manipulate the app’s powerful algorithm to influence what Americans see, all in ways that are nearly impossible to detect. TikTok, for its part, has long denied these allegations, insisting it is not a tool of Beijing.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling and the law’s official enactment the day before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, TikTok has remained available to U.S. users. President Trump, exercising executive authority, signed an order in June 2025 to keep the app running for an additional 90 days while negotiations for a sale continued—a move that marked the third such deadline extension. Trump explained the delay as necessary "so that we can make a deal to protect our national security." Yet, these repeated extensions have drawn skepticism from legal experts, who told the BBC that the administration may not have the legal authority to continually postpone the ban, given that it was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court.
Now, with the latest deadline looming, the question of who will ultimately control TikTok’s U.S. operations has become a high-stakes guessing game. President Trump, in his December 15 remarks, hinted that the identity of the buyers would be revealed within two weeks, but was short on specifics. He did, however, acknowledge that the deal would likely require approval from China, stating, "I think I’ll need, probably, China approval, and I think President Xi will probably do it."
Behind the scenes, a complex web of investors is vying for a piece of TikTok’s American business. Reporting by Tim Bernard in Platforms & Society and Forbes suggests that a consortium including Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and the Emirati tech fund MGX is poised to secure a 45% stake in the new entity. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, is expected to retain a 19.9% share, while other investors—including heavyweights like KKR, Sequoia, and Susquehanna—would hold the remaining 35%. Notably, Oracle is substantially owned by Larry Ellison, a prominent Trump ally, raising questions about the intersection of politics and business in the deal.
Other potential suitors have also surfaced, including Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone, and even media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and tech billionaire Michael Dell. There’s speculation that ByteDance and its existing investors could acquire shares in the new company as well, though the final ownership structure remains unsettled.
The implications of this ownership shakeup are profound—not just for TikTok’s users, but for the broader landscape of American media and democracy. Platform governance scholar Paddy Leerssen of the University of Amsterdam has analyzed how different ownership models can shape content moderation and policy. In his recent paper, Leerssen argues that platforms controlled by a single individual, like Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), often reflect "private logics"—that is, the personal preferences and political leanings of the owner. By contrast, companies with more diffuse, institutional ownership (think Apple or Microsoft) tend to operate under "market logics," focused on profit and shareholder value, though even these are not immune to political pressures.
Leerssen cautions that "platforms and their content governance thus operate in a field of increasingly politicized struggle between various financial actors and institutions, including Silicon Valley's tech moguls but also (broadly Democrat-aligned) banks and investment funds and (broadly Republican-aligned) private equity groups." The presence of Trump’s political backers among the likely investors in TikTok has fueled concerns that the platform could become a tool for partisan influence, especially given recent history in Hungary and the Trump administration’s own record on media criticism and regulation.
Yet, the reality may be more nuanced. Even if the leadership of the new TikTok entity leans in a particular political direction, the fiduciary responsibilities of institutional investors and the sheer diversity of stakeholders could act as a brake on overtly partisan content policy. As Leerssen notes, "the sheer number of organizations that will need to be on the same page regarding policy direction may also prove to be an obstacle to private logics playing out." Moreover, TikTok’s large and multi-layered trust and safety team, not to mention its young user base, may help insulate the platform from sudden or dramatic shifts in content moderation.
Still, plenty of questions remain unanswered. The Chinese government has yet to fully approve the sale, and the precise balance of ownership and control is far from settled. As reported by The Media Leader on December 16, 2025, the U.S. government appears poised to extend the ban-or-sale deadline for TikTok for a fifth time, underscoring the ongoing uncertainty. Legal experts continue to debate whether the administration has the authority to keep moving the goalposts, and the lack of transparency around the deal only adds to the confusion.
For now, TikTok’s millions of U.S. users can only wait and watch as the saga unfolds. The stakes are enormous—not just for the future of a beloved app, but for the principles of free expression, national security, and media independence in a digital age where the lines between business, politics, and technology are blurrier than ever.
