After years of political theater, legal battles, and a brief blackout that sent 170 million Americans into withdrawal, TikTok is getting its American makeover.
CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees yesterday that the company has signed a deal to create a new U.S. entity that will close on January 22, 2026.
The structure is more convoluted than your average corporate acquisition, but here’s what matters: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX will each own 15% of the new entity, called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. That’s 45% total going to this consortium.
READ: TikTok U.S. Takeover: The Price, The Players, and The Politics
Another 30% goes to affiliates of ByteDance’s existing investors, and ByteDance itself keeps just under 20%.
American investors will hold the majority, which satisfies the law Congress passed last year demanding ByteDance either sell or face a ban.
The Supreme Court upheld that law in January, leading to TikTok briefly going dark before President Trump started issuing extensions while negotiating this deal. The U.S. and China finally agreed on a framework in September, and now the paperwork is signed.
The new joint venture gets control over everything that made Washington nervous: data protection, the recommendation algorithm, content moderation, and the app’s underlying software.
Oracle, which already hosts TikTok’s U.S. data in its cloud, will serve as the “trusted security partner,” auditing everything to make sure the company follows national security requirements.
In addition, the joint venture will retrain TikTok’s content recommendation system using only U.S. user data, supposedly insulating American feeds from outside manipulation.
ByteDance’s global operation will still handle e-commerce, advertising, marketing, and making sure the app works the same way worldwide, but the core systems powering the American version will be managed independently.
The deal values TikTok’s U.S. business at around $14 billion. That’s the number Vice President JD Vance mentioned in September when noting that China showed “some resistance” to the arrangement.
Apparently the resistance wasn’t insurmountable, because both governments signed off on letting this proceed.
Trump first demanded ByteDance sell TikTok’s U.S. operations back in 2020 during his first term. When he returned to office in 2025, he kept postponing enforcement of the ban law through executive orders while his administration worked on this deal.
His September executive order gave everyone 120 days to finalize things, which brings us to the January 22 deadline.
Users, creators, and advertisers have nothing to worry about, as the promise is that nothing changes. It’s still the same app, same features, and same global community. The only difference is that it’s now American-owned with American oversight.
