U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been in Malaysia for two days engaging in trade negotiations with representatives from China. Apparently it’s been, as Bessent put it in a Sunday appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, “a very good two days”—so good, he claims, that the deal to give an American company control of TikTok is all hashed out and ready to be sealed when presidents Trump and Xi meet in South Korea next week.
In fact, Bessent says the details were negotiated in Madrid, last month when he met with Chinese negotiators while on a trip to Spain and the UK. That sheds a tiny bit of light on what Trump meant when he posted a confusing statement on Truth Social about the TikTok deal on September 19. “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!”
What, exactly, did “the TikTok approval” mean? Perhaps this deal.
A de jure ban on TikTok was passed in spring of last year, and theoretically went into effect this past January. President Trump has repeatedly delayed enforcement of the ban, which could mean measures like forcing app stores to take it down or blocking its use, instead slowly chipping away at negotiations to bring it under U.S. control.
And rumor has it the U.S. is very much going to be in control of this new version of TikTok. It sounds as if Trump and China have worked out a deal to spin off a separate app for U.S. customers, and allow this new U.S. version to be controlled by a patchwork of U.S.-based investors, all while allowing the China-based parent company, ByteDance, to possess the coveted and highly addictive TikTok algorithm as they license it to the U.S. spinoff.
That consortium of new owners is said to involve the Murdoch family, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.
Bessent was light on details other than that. “My remit was to get the Chinese to agree to approve the transaction, and I believe we successfully accomplished that over the past two days,” he said.