A meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials went well and a deal was reached regarding “a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save,” President Donald Trump posted on his social media site on Monday.
Trump’s comment suggests that the company is TikTok, the social media company associated with China that U.S. law requires to be sold or else cease operations.
The Republican president has repeatedly extended the deadline on TikTok’s fate and was noncommittal on an agreement when asked by reporters on Sunday evening. Trump also said that he would be speaking on Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump’s cryptic tweet comes after months of reports linking Larry Ellison — the Oracle CEO who briefly unseated Elon Musk as the world’s richest man last week after a blockbuster earnings report — to the long-negotiated TikTok takeover. The Ellison family is emerging as multimedia moguls in the Trump era, with Ellison’s son, 42-year-old David Ellison, having completed his long-running takeover of legacy Hollywood studio Paramount in the summer of 2024.
David Ellison laid out his vision in July 2024 of Paramount becoming a “tech hybrid” that can compete with streaming giant Netflix, and just last week, Paramount was reported by The Wall Street Journal to be considering a bid for another subscale legacy Hollywood studio, Warner Brothers. In other words, a scenario is possible under which TikTok, Paramount and Warner Brothers, including the latter two’s portfolio of brands ranging from CBS to CNN to IP such as Star Trek, the DC Comics superheroes and Looney Tunes, would all fall under Ellison control. David Ellison has hired away former topline Netflix talent for Paramount in programming chief Cindy Holland and the “Stranger Things” creators, the Duffer brothers.
As Fortune‘s Diane Brady wrote in August, “pop culture and politics are intertwined in the age of Trump.”
Trump said on Truth Social that “a deal was reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save. They will be very happy!”
The Chinese government has yet to confirm Trump’s statements.
The basis of Trump’s post stemmed from a meeting in Spain that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had with Chinese officials, including Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, in which TikTok was to be a subject, according to a statement by the Treasury Department.
During Joe Biden’s Democratic presidency, Congress and the White House used national security grounds to approve a U.S. ban on TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold its controlling stake.
But Trump has kept delaying the possible reckoning for the social media app. He has extended the deadline three times during his second term — with the next one coming up on Sept. 17.
TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok while keeping the app separate from Douyin.
Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.
The often silly videos and music clips content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.
TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.
Challenges came in tandem with TikTok’s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.