President Trump appeared to suggest on Friday that a deal to separate TikTok from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, had been approved by China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
In a post on Truth Social after a call with Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump wrote, “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval.” But he also said, “we made progress on many very important issues” including the approval of the TikTok deal. He did not elaborate on what the approval entailed.
A readout of the call from a Chinese state-run news agency was similarly vague, but Mr. Xi appeared to support a commercial solution to TikTok. The news agency reported that Mr. Xi said the Chinese government “respects the wishes of companies and welcomes them to conduct commercial negotiations based on market rules and reach solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and balance interests.”
TikTok’s future has been in limbo in the United States since January, when a federal law took effect requiring the company to find a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States. The law was intended to address national security concerns that the app’s ownership could give Beijing a channel to spread propaganda or to collect sensitive data about Americans. Mr. Trump has extended the deadline four times.
ByteDance has for months been in talks to spin out the app’s American operations into a new company, and to bring on new U.S. investors, like the software giant Oracle, to dilute its Chinese ownership and satisfy the law’s requirements. The list of other potential investors has been in flux, two people familiar with the talks said.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump added a detail: The United States would be receiving a “tremendous fee” for putting the deal together. If that occurs, it would be the latest example of the government’s incursion into corporate deal making. In recent months, the Trump administration has negotiated and obtained a 10 percent stake in Intel, and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel as part of its sale to Nippon Steel.
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