President Donald Trump and TikTok announced Thursday that the companies have formed a joint venture to continue operating the video-sharing app in the United States under new U.S. guidance.
Adam Presser, who previously served as TikTok’s head of operations and head of reliability and safety, will become CEO of the TikTok USDS joint venture, the company said. Presser has worked at TikTok for about four years and was previously a senior executive at Warner Bros.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew will serve on the board of the newly formed venture, which will operate as an “independent entity,” according to Thursday’s announcement.
The TikTok USDS joint venture “will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protection, algorithmic security, content moderation, and software assurance for U.S. users,” the company said.
President Trump welcomed the deal in a Thursday post on Truth Social, saying the company will now be owned by “the largest group of great American patriots and investors in the world.”
He also thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping for working with his administration and “ultimately approving the agreement.”
“He could have chosen a different path, but he didn’t. I commend him for his decision,” Trump wrote. China has not issued any official statement confirming the agreement.
TikTok said the new venture will be governed by a seven-person board of directors, the majority of whom are American. In addition to Mr. Chew, the board of directors includes Timothy Dattels of TPG Global, Mark Dooley of Susquehanna International Group, Egon Durban, co-CEO of Silver Lake, and Raul Fernandez, CEO of DXC Technology. oracleKenneth Glück and David Scott of MGX.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance will own a 19.9% stake in the new business. Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX are new managing investors. Other backers include Michael Dell’s investment firm Vastomir Strategic Investments, Alpha Wave Partners, Revolution, and Via Nova, an affiliate of General Atlantic.
ByteDance was originally subject to a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden that would have effectively banned the company in the country unless it sold its U.S. operations. The law was not enacted because of several executive orders signed by President Donald Trump last year.
Those orders prevented the attorney general from enforcing national security laws while the app’s leaders searched for a buyer.
“Interoperability will allow the joint venture to offer a global TikTok experience to U.S. users, ensure the discovery of U.S. creators, and enable the company to operate on a global scale,” the company said. “TikTok Global’s U.S. entity will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising and marketing.”
TikTok’s valuable content recommendation algorithms will be hosted within Oracle’s U.S. data centers and will be retrained, tested and updated based on U.S. user data, the company said. The new structure will also help sibling apps like CapCut, Lemon8, and other unspecified services and websites continue to operate in the United States, according to the statement.
The Chinese government has not publicly commented on the deal, but Semaphore reported earlier Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, that the U.S. and Chinese governments have agreed to the sale and that the deal is expected to close this week.
President Trump said in September that Chinese President Xi Jinping had agreed to move forward with the deal, which was codified in an executive order that month. At the time, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said there was “some resistance” from the Chinese government to support the deal, which valued TikTok’s U.S. operations at $14 billion.
In December, Chu revealed the name of TikTok’s U.S. entity to employees and announced that the company had signed an agreement to establish a new joint venture in the U.S., CNBC reported.
Spotlight: TikTok signs agreement to establish new joint venture in the US:
