Trump Administration Will Reportedly Receive $10 Billion From TikTok Deal

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to receive roughly $10 billion from investors involved in the deal that transferred control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese parent company, according to a Friday report from The Wall Street Journal.

People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that the payment stems from an agreement in which a group of investors aligned with the administration took over TikTok’s American business from ByteDance. The investors backing the new U.S. entity include Oracle Corporation, private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment group MGX.

According to the report, the group already paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January. Additional payments are expected over time until the total reaches about $10 billion.

When outlining the framework for the TikTok arrangement last September, Trump signaled that the government would seek compensation for facilitating the deal.

“It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” Trump said at the time, adding that the government’s role in negotiating the arrangement justified a payment. He remarked a day prior in the Oval Office, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus — I call it a fee-plus — just for making the deal, and I don’t want to throw that out the window.”

The size of the payment would be highly unusual for a government helping arrange a corporate transaction, historians told the Journal. For comparison, the WSJ’s Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar noted that investment banks advising on major mergers typically earn less than 1% of the total deal value.

For broader context, the deal was arranged to comply with legislation requiring TikTok to reduce ByteDance’s ownership stake or face the possibility of being shut down in the U.S. over national security concerns tied to Chinese control of the app. The new U.S. entity now shares profits with ByteDance, which licensed its widely used recommendation algorithm to the venture and retains nearly a 20% stake in the company.

While Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. business is valued at roughly $14 billion, per the WSJ, some tech analysts argue the platform may be worth significantly more.

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