The Trump administration is set to receive roughly $10 billion from investors involved in the deal that transferred control of TikTok's US operations from its Chinese parent company, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal released on Friday.
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. The investors backing the new US entity include Oracle Corporation, private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment group MGX.
The fee structure is striking in several respects. The size of the payment would be highly unusual for a government helping arrange a corporate transaction, historians told the Journal. For comparison, investment banks advising on major mergers typically earn less than 1% of the total deal value. Given that Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the US business is valued at roughly $14 billion, the $10 billion payment to government represents a substantial portion of the total deal value.
The deal came about following federal legislation that required TikTok to sever ties with Chinese ownership. 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 US over national security concerns tied to Chinese control of the app. The president used a series of executive actions to extend that deadline and the White House helped broker the sale to a group led by Oracle Corp. and Silver Lake Management LLC.
Trump himself previewed the arrangement months earlier. "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," Trump said in September.
Under the final structure, the new US 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. The arrangement creates an unusual situation where an American-controlled entity manages US operations and data while retaining some connection to the Chinese parent company.
The TikTok arrangement is not the first instance of this administration collecting substantial fees or equity stakes in major corporate deals. This pattern suggests an approach where government views itself as a dealmaker entitled to significant compensation for facilitating transactions rather than merely enforcing existing law.