More than five years after President Donald Trump first signed an executive order on “the threat posed by TikTok,” he is set to sign another to announce a deal that would give control of the app’s United States operations to a group of investors. Trump is set to sign the executive order on Thursday, September 25.
The White House confirmed to NBC News a newly formed joint venture will run the U.S. operations. On Sunday, September 21, Trump told Fox News that Austin-based Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Michael Dell of Round Rock’s Dell Technologies and Fox Corp. executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch, who took over the business from his father Rupert Murdoch, would be involved in the deal.
Trump’s interview on the Sunday Briefing follows remarks from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Saturday, September 20, that “TikTok will be majority-owned by Americans in the United States,” noting the long-awaited deal “does put America first.”
Leavitt explained there will be seven seats on the board of the newly-formed joint venture, six of which will be U.S. citizens, adding that Ellison’s company Oracle will manage security and privacy under the new deal. It is not immediately clear who the other three board members will be.
All user data will be managed by Oracle and stored in the U.S., Leavitt said. She also said the algorithm “will be secured, retrained and operated in the United States.”
Oracle’s Texas roots are more complicated as the official headquarters is still currently listed at 2300 Oracle Way in Austin, but the tech giant announced in 2024 plans to move its HQ to Nashville. The plan to build its Nashville campus were previously said to be completed by 2031.
It is not immediately clear where the TikTok user data will be stored across Oracle’s number of U.S. data centers. Operations for the US East are located in Ashburn, Virginia, US West in Phoenix, Arizona and San Jose, California, and US Midwest in Chicago. MySA has reached out to Oracle for more information.
Larry Ellison is the co-founder of the tech giant Oracle, who currently serves as chairman of the company’s board and as chief technology officer. His brief biography on the Oracle website says that he founded the company in 1977 and was CEO until 2014.
He’s also currently the world’s second richest man, with a net worth of $368 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. On September 11, he briefly eclipsed Elon Musk to be the world’s richest man when the stock markets opened. Musk had retaken his crown by the time markets closed the same day.
Michael Dell, a Houston-native, is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. According to his biography on the Dell website, he founded Dell Technologies in 1984 at the age of 19 with $1,000.