LAS VEGAS – Back in March 2025 at Prosper in Las Vegas, Michelle Barnum Smith at TikTok Shop Sellers confidently declared, “TikTok is not going away. People need to lean in and get their money.” At the time it did not seem so clear-cut.
Congress had passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in 2024, a rare bi-partisan piece of legislation mandating that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divest its U.S. operations or face a ban.
Last week the New York Times cited an internal TikTok memo that revealed new agreements with three investors to help form an American version of TikTok.
“The agreements do not mean that a deal for an American version of TikTok is done, as these investors would form only 45 percent of the new ownership,” wrote NY Times reporter Emmett Lindner. “It’s not clear where the rest of the deal stands. In the memo, the chief executive, Shou Chew, said TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, had signed binding agreements with the software giant Oracle; Silver Lake, an investment company; and MGX, an Emirati investment firm. Those three and other investors would run a new version of the popular short-form video app.”
Despite a Trump administration “blessing” of the emerging framework, the new deal has raised concerns from Jim Secreto, a Treasury Dept. official in the Biden administration and Brett Freedman, chief of staff at the national security division of the Department of Justice. In an NY Times opinion piece, Secreto and Freedman contend that Americans should be skeptical.
“We believe the proposed structure fails to resolve the national security risks and revives elements of a plan the U.S. government has already rejected,” wrote Secreto and Freeman in the Dec. 23 guest essay. “Most concerning, it appears to endorse an arrangement that TikTok itself told the courts it could not realistically implement in accordance with federal law.”