Billionaire Trump Is Angling for a Massive TikTok Payday
The Trump administration is collecting a massive fee for its role in brokering the deal.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The president secured another hefty payout for his administration from his perch in the Oval Office.
The Trump administration is set to take a $10 billion cut of the deal to create a U.S.-controlled version of TikTok, charging investors a massive fee for the government’s role in brokering the transaction.
About $2.5 billion was paid when the deal closed in January, according to The Wall Street Journal, with several additional payments expected until the total reaches roughly $10 billion.
The payment comes on top of billions that investors have poured into the newly structured company that now controls TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Oracle co-founder, CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Ellison's son David is poised to control a lion's share of US media this year.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Those investors include private equity firm Silver Lake, the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX, and Oracle, the cloud software giant co-founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison.
“The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal,” Trump said when outlining the framework for the transaction last year.
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The deal effectively wrested control of TikTok’s U.S. operations away from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and handed it to the new American investor group. ByteDance still holds just under a 20 percent stake in the venture.
To keep the platform running, ByteDance also licensed its closely guarded recommendation algorithm to the new company—the secret sauce behind TikTok’s addictive “For You” feed.
Trump, whose administration will profit from the sale of TikTok's U.S. operations, was spotted dancing in a video on the platform this week, as more than a dozen soldiers die in his unauthorized war.
X/Clash Report/TikTok/Jake Paul
Vice President JD Vance told reporters in September that the new U.S. TikTok entity was valued at about $14 billion. If that estimate holds, the government’s $10 billion fee would amount to an extraordinary slice of the company’s worth.
By comparison, investment banks advising on major mergers typically collect less than 1 percent of a deal’s value in fees.
But Trump administration officials told the Wall Street Journal that the payment is justified because Trump personally pushed the negotiations across the finish line while navigating talks with China and addressing lawmakers’ security concerns.
Congress passed legislation forcing ByteDance to reduce its ownership stake in TikTok or face a potential U.S. ban, a law signed by President Joe Biden that triggered months of high-stakes negotiations over the app’s future.
The TikTok arrangement is the latest example of the Trump administration inserting itself directly into major corporate deals involving some of the world’s biggest companies.
The government has taken equity stakes in several companies, including semiconductor giant Intel, and secured a so-called “golden share” in U.S. Steel during its takeover by Japan’s Nippon Steel, giving Washington unusual veto power over key corporate decisions.
It also struck an agreement with chipmaker NVIDIA, tying export licenses for advanced chips to China to a share of the company’s sales.
The TikTok payment, however, goes a step further, effectively giving the government a multibillion-dollar cut of a private-sector deal.
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