TikTok’s US operations officially separate from ByteDance

TikTok’s future in the United States took a decisive turn in September 2025, when the president signed an executive order approving what officials called a “qualified divestiture” of the app’s American operations from its Chinese parent, ByteDance. The order followed more than a year of legal wrangling: a federal law had required ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US business or see the app pulled from American app stores, and enforcement had already been delayed several times while negotiators worked out the details.

Under the framework agreed that September, TikTok’s US operations would move to a new joint venture controlled mainly by American investors, with reports naming Oracle, the private equity firm Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi-backed fund MGX as the lead buyers. ByteDance was expected to keep a minority stake under 20 percent. Oracle, which already stored TikTok’s US user data, was set to take on a bigger role auditing the app’s content-recommendation algorithm once it was retrained on American data. The deal still needed months of paperwork before it could close, but it gave roughly 170 million American TikTok users their clearest signal yet that the app was staying.