TikTok’s Long-Awaited U.S. Joint Venture Deal To Finally Close Next Month, CEO Memo Confirms

In a memo to employees, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said Thursday the long-awaited creation of a joint venture to oversee the U.S. part of the China-based video platform finally is about to close.

The JV will take effect on January 22, Chew said.

Axios first reported on the memo, whose contents were confirmed to Deadline by a person familiar with the separation process.

The transaction, set in motion by a congressional order that survived an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, will force China’s ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok to a new mix of investors. About 20% of the U.S. entity will continue to be owned by ByteDance and another third by affiliates of existing investors. The remaining 45% will be owned by tech giant Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s government-backed investment firm MGX.

The Oracle component could be notable in Hollywood given the ties between the company’s co-founder, Larry Ellison, and Paramount Skydance. His son, David Ellison, is CEO, and the elder Ellison is a backer of the company’s bid for Warner Bros Discovery. While execs have publicly declined to address it, some industry watchers have speculated that Paramount could make the most of that connection in order to supercharge its offerings to better compete with tech giants.

RELATED: Warner Bros Discovery Urges Shareholders To Reject Paramount’s Hostile Bid

Political officials have raised national-security concerns the video platform since Donald Trump‘s first administration. In 2020, Trump threatened to ban the app unless it was sold to a U.S.-based owner. When Joe Biden took office, legal pushback from TikTok on the Trump ban succeeded in winning a years-long stay, but the issue bubbled up again by 2024.

Trump in his current term switched to a more supportive stance given the support he received via TikTok in the election. The current strategy has been to essentially recapitalize it, though the all-powerful algorithm cannot be walled off from the Chinese headquarters. For that and other reasons, the use of the word “sale” to describe the TikTok deal has drawn objections from the company as well as from some observers from the tech, media and political spheres.

Since taking office again in January, Trump has continued to revise the deadline for a deal to break up the U.S. portion of TikTok.

As its political battles were being waged, TikTok as a business has continued growing, and the company hosted a splashy presentation to advertisers during the NewFronts in the spring.

Khartoon Weiss, head of North American ad sales, sought to tamp down speculation at the time about the app being forced to shut down. “We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she told NewFront attendees. “So we’re going to continue to invest in it.”