Shortly after Monday’s inauguration ceremony, President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending the deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations, preventing the app from going dark for an additional 75 days.
The executive order instructs the US Attorney General to abstain from enforcing the law that would ban the app and require companies like Apple and Google to remove it from their app stores. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Days before the January 19 deadline, Trump suggested that he would “save” the app once he formally took office. In an interview with Kristen Welker at NBC News on Saturday, Trump said that he would give ByteDance more time to find a buyer, but did not explain how he planned to do so. “We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” he said.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump confirmed that the extension would be done by way of an executive order that would allow his administration to negotiate a deal with ByteDance. In his post, Trump said that he would pursue a 50 percent joint venture agreement with ByteDance, preferably with a US entity.
“By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to [stay] up,” Trump wrote. “Without US approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars—maybe trillions.”
ByteDance and TikTok have yet to publicly respond to Trump’s proposal. At the Monday signing ceremony, Trump said that he thinks TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew would “really like it.” Trump said private companies could be involved in financing the negotiation. “I think you have a lot of people that will be interested in TikTok with the United States as a partner,” he said.
The executive order itself doesn’t mention divestiture, but instead says that the 75-day reprieve is for the “opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way.”
The rush to keep TikTok online came after the company suffered a devastating blow at the hands of the US Supreme Court. On Friday, the court upheld a law forcing a sale of TikTok to an American owner in order to stave off a nationwide ban. The decision came only two days before the law was set to go into effect.
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, TikTok users received a notification alerting them that the app was no longer available to US users as a result of the sell-or-ban law. Around the same time Apple and Google removed the app from their app stores, other ByteDance-owned apps, including CapCut, Lemon8, and Marvel Snap, were also taken down. TikTok was down for around 15 hours before the company issued a statement announcing that it would return.
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” the company said Sunday evening.
The divestiture law has faced resentment from both sides of the aisle. “In Washington DC doing meetings trying to get this TikTok ban lifted,” wrote Soulja Boy, in a post on X over the weekend. The rap artist was in town to perform at a crypto industry inauguration party.
A variety of American financiers considered buying the app, including former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and former Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. McCourt’s Project Liberty made a formal bid after the Supreme Court announced its decision. Elon Musk’s name was also floated in talks about a deal with the Chinese government, according to Bloomberg.
On Monday, Trump suggested that he could impose retaliatory tariffs against China if the Chinese government refuses to negotiate a deal resolving the US government’s national security concerns with TikTok. “I’m not saying I would, but you could certainly do it,” he said.
