Trump Brokering Deal to Hand TikTok Over to Right-Wing Billionaires Andreessen and Ellison

President Donald Trump is pushing to finalize a deal that would hand majority control of TikTok over to a consortium that includes two of his closest billionaire allies.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that under the planned deal, 80% of the stake will be controlled by a group of American investors, while the remaining 20% will remain with Chinese firms.

The American companies include the investment firm Silver Lake, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the technology company Oracle. The latter two are controlled by some of Trump's most prolific supporters.

Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5 million to Trump's super PAC during the 2024 election.

Andreessen, who said at the end of 2024 he was spending roughly "half" his time at Mar-a-Lago, was tapped as an economic adviser to Trump earlier this year, where he helped to recruit staffers to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After unleashing a bevy of false claims, Andreessen led the charge for DOGE to virtually kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he'd long loathed for its investigations into his investment firms.

Oracle, meanwhile, was founded by Larry Ellison—one of Trump's earliest backers in the Silicon Valley world—who reportedly advised the president during his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Over the next five years, Ellison accumulated enough wealth to briefly overtake Musk as the world's richest person and has used those riches to consolidate control over the media. After taking office in January for his second term, Trump began to champion Ellison as the man to take over TikTok.

In August—with the help of Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC)— SkyDance, owned by Ellison's son David, purchased Paramount, which owns CBS News. The younger Ellison quickly began making moves to reshape the network's politics, most notably by planning to purchase the "anti-woke" publication the Free Press and recruiting its founder, Bari Weiss, to a senior editorial role, which has left newsroom staffers fearing for their editorial independence. Ellison also has designs on a $70 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give him control over CNN as well.

Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America warns that soon, "one Trump-aligned billionaire family could end up controlling CBS News, CNN, and TikTok."

Gertz noted that TikTok would join a media ecosystem that is increasingly bowing to the president, with X and Meta controlled by Trump-aligned billionaires and the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times shifting their coverage to flatter his worldview. Meanwhile, nominal holdouts like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have been slapped with multibillion-dollar lawsuits, as Trump has accused them of trying to harm him with negative coverage.

Trump said that he plans to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday to finalize the sale of TikTok, which is currently owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance.

The sale of the platform was set into motion in 2024 under President Joe Biden, who signed legislation banning TikTok in the United States unless it was sold to a US company. Congress justified the decision at the time by claiming that China was using the app to surveil Americans and using the platform's algorithm to feed them propaganda, though free press advocates criticized the ban as an effort to censor opinions and information unfavorable to the US government.

One persistent gripe from advocates for the ban was that the platform had become a major source for videos depicting the visceral horrors of Israel's military assault on Gaza. In one infamous exchange, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken and then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pointed to TikTok as a reason why “the PR has been so awful” for Israel since the war began and said that this was a primary motivation behind the ban among legislators.

Its soon-to-be new partial-owner, Ellison, however, is one of Israel's staunchest supporters. He has donated at least $26 million to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) via a nonprofit called "Friends of the IDF" and once offered a seat on Oracle's board to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Independent journalist Jack Poulson also reported this week that David Ellison once coordinated with former Israeli military commander-in-chief Benny Gantz on an effort to spy on and disrupt American activists for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

"The panic over TikTok was always in part because it is a prime source for factually accurate coverage of the Gaza genocide," said Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, on X. "Now one of the leading pro-Israel fanatics is set to take control and ensure that young people don't keep getting videos telling the truth about Palestine."

According to the Journal, TikTok's new proprietors will not be reconstructing the app's much-maligned algorithm from the ground up. Rather, "TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance."

As tech columnist John Herrman points out for New York magazine, this deal doesn't resolve the "stated reasons" for the ban, since it still gives its Chinese owners a stake in the company and uses their underlying technology.

"When it comes to the TikTok ban, though, 'stated reasons' were never especially useful," Herrman wrote. "In the end, the TikTok ban wasn’t primarily about national security or influence—although this new arrangement will have implications for both—but rather political control, and the demonstration thereof."