With a deadline for TikTok to shut down in the US looming this Saturday (April 5), President Donald Trump says he expects a deal to rescue the platform will get done in time.
Asked aboard Air Force One on Sunday night (March 30) whether he would extend the shutdown deadline if needed, Trump said, “There’ll be a deal with TikTok,” and added “we would,” apparently in reference to an extension, according to a report at The Hill.
“We have a lot of potential buyers,” Trump said, as quoted by Reuters. “There’s tremendous interest in Tiktok… I’d like to see TikTok remain alive.”
The deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to divest its US operations or face a shutdown of the app in the US was originally set for January 19 under the “divest-or-ban” bill that became law last year.
TikTok briefly disabled access to the app on that day – one day before Trump was inaugurated as president – but restored access as the incoming president signed a 75-day extension that pushed out the deadline to April 5.
In recent months, numerous investors have formed consortia to bid on TikTok’s US assets. Most recently, Reuters said in an exclusive report that Blackstone – the investment management giant that bought Hipgnosis Songs Fund last year – is weighing taking a “small” stake in one of those bids.
“There’s tremendous interest in Tiktok… I’d like to see TikTok remain alive.”
President Donald Trump
Blackstone is discussing that possibility with a group of existing non-Chinese ByteDance shareholders led by Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic, Reuters reported.
Their proposal would see TikTok’s US operations spun off into a company independent of ByteDance, with Chinese shareholders making up less than 20% of ownership in the new company, as required by the divest-or-ban law.
This investor group is considered to be among the frontrunners in the race to acquire TikTok in the US.
Another frontrunner is Oracle Corp., the Texas-headquartered tech company that has been working with TikTok in recent years on Project Texas, an initiative designed to keep US TikTok users’ data in the US amid concerns that ByteDance is sharing that data with the government in Beijing.
That effort proved unsuccessful, and a large bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress passed the divest-or-ban bill last April, with President Joe Biden signing the bill into law shortly thereafter.
According to a report at Politico last month, Oracle has been involved in talks with senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, about a potential acquisition.
“We’re trying to close this thing by early April,” Vance told Politico at the time.
“I think that the outlines of this thing will be very clear. The question is whether we can get all the paper done. There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.”
Other contenders for TikTok include Perplexity AI, which has reportedly put forward a proposal that would create a new entity combining its operations with TikTok’s US business, potentially allowing up to 50% government ownership following a public offering valued at at least $300 billion.
There is also a group led by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty, which has reportedly submitted a bid, the value of which is unknown, and a group led by Employer.com founder Jesse Tinsley, which has the backing of prominent YouTuber MrBeast, Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki, and Anchorage Digital co-founder and CEO Nathan McCauley.Music ComeOn
