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As Trump Signs TikTok Order, Critics Sound Alarm Over Corruption and US Propaganda
One watchdog leader noted that the president's deal involves "one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
Sep 25, 2025
President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order claiming to "save" TikTok from a federal law that would ban the video-sharing platform in the United States, but critics are condemning the Republican's deal as yet another case of him "picking winners and losers in government policy based on who is enriching his family."
Trump initially kicked off efforts to force TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest with an August 2020 executive order, but Democratic former President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan legislation that would ban the platform based on national security concerns last year.
Since returning to office, Trump has pledged to "save" TikTok, delaying enforcement of the law and negotiating a deal under which, according to a White House fact sheet, the US application "will be majority-owned by US investors, operated in the US by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, and subject to strict rules to protect Americans' data and our national security."
The fact sheet also confirms that "ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock as required by law," and "Oracle—one of the nation's leading technology companies—will act as TikTok’s security provider and independently monitor and assure the safety of all operations in the US."
Critics have expressed alarm about both the anticipated quality of the US platform and the reported investors.
OpenSecrets noted Thursday that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison is "a Trump supporter and major bankroller of Republican candidates and causes," and the company "has spent at least $11 million on federal-level government lobbying during each of the past four full years," a trend that is set to continue this year.
Citing unnamed sources, CNBC reported Thursday that, in addition to Oracle, the main investors will be Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX. Previous reporting has also suggested involvement from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Trump on the TikTok deal: "Rupert Murdoch is involved."
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
While some opponents of the Trump plan have highlighted his ties to Ellison, Andreessen, and Horowitz, Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, focused on his relationship with MGX in a Thursday statement.
"President Trump's use of his office to enrich himself and his friends seems to know no bounds," Carrk said. "His grand scheme to 'save' TikTok just so happens to involve the enrichment of one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
"That's no coincidence for the only US president in history that has seen his bottom line grow by billions from the White House," he asserted. "Meanwhile, working Americans see their costs continue to increase, from groceries to healthcare to housing. It's clear the president's priority is himself, not the rest of us."
Trump's Thursday order affirms that the deal complies with last year's law and allows another 120 days to finalize the details.
The Associated Press reported that "Trump said Thursday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has agreed to move forward with it. However, the Chinese embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to an AP inquiry seeking confirmation that China has formally signed off on the proposed framework deal."
US political leaders have long claimed that under ByteDance's control, users may encounter content favored by the Chinese government. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said earlier this week that "if the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for US government propaganda."
Joining Trump in the Oval Office for the executive order signing on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance seemed to confirm that's the plan, telling reporters that "the US company will have control over how the algorithm pushes content to users, and that was a very important part of it."
Responding to Vance's remarks, one social media user quipped, "Ahh, so it was just an issue of *whose* propaganda."
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Trump Brokering Deal to Hand TikTok Over to Right-Wing Billionaires Andreessen and Ellison
"The TikTok ban wasn’t primarily about national security or influence... but rather political control," one tech columnist wrote.
Sep 17, 2025
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."
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