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By Aliss Higham
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The Trump administration is set to receive a $10 billion fee tied to the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium of American investors, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
A federal law required TikTok to either shut down in the United States or be sold to domestic owners at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in 2025.
However, the president issued a series of executive actions extending the deadline, while the White House helped broker a sale to a group led by cloud-computing tech giant Oracle Corp. and private-equity firm Silver Lake Management LLC.
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Why It Matters
Lawmakers in the United States have raised national security concerns about TikTok largely because it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and argued it could potentially give the Chinese government access to large amounts of data on American users. The popular social media app has around 135 million users in the U.S. alone.
The new entity, called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, will oversee content moderation on the platform and safeguard the data of U.S. users.
What To Know
The fee is to be paid by investors involved in the TikTok transaction, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Newsweek has been unable to independently verify the report, and has contacted the White House for comment via email outside of regular working hours.
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The payment is part of a broader agreement that transferred control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from ByteDance to a group of investors seen as friendly with the administration, according to people familiar with the matter. It comes on top of investments used to establish the new company that now operates the app in the U.S.
Those investors include Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi–based investor MGX. The group and its backers paid about $2.5 billion to the Treasury Department when the deal closed in January and are expected to make additional payments until the total reaches $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Administration officials have said the fee is justified, pointing to Trump’s role in preserving TikTok’s U.S. operations and helping steer negotiations with China to broker the deal while addressing lawmakers’ national security concerns, according to the Wall Street Journal.
TikTok Deal
TikTok announced in 2025 that the joint venture will be led by chief executive officer Adam Presser and chief security officer Will Farrell. Oversight will come from a board that includes TikTok U.S. CEO Shou Chew; Kenneth Glueck, executive vice president in the Office of the Chief Executive Officer at Oracle; and representatives from Silver Lake, MGX, and other companies involved in the deal.
“The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users,” the group said in a statement in September.
The deal was finalized in January. Speaking about the deal in a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump thanked those involved, including Chinese President Xi Jinping.
"I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok! It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice," he wrote in the January 26 post.
"Along with other factors, it was responsible for my doing so well with the Youth Vote in the 2024 Presidential Election. I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok. Thank you to Vice President JD Vance, and all of the others within my Administration, who helped bring this Deal to a very dramatic, final, and beautiful conclusion.
"I would also like to thank President Xi, of China, for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal. He could have gone the other way, but didn’t, and is appreciated for his decision," Trump added.
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