By Addison Thompson 
TikTok’s American business changed owners at the start of 2026, ending a fight that began with a 2024 divestiture law and ran through five separate White House deadline extensions. The new entity, TikTok USDS, is a joint venture in which ByteDance’s direct stake fell below the 20% ceiling set by federal law, while Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi-backed MGX fund each took 15% stakes and gained board seats. It is a genuinely unusual outcome: a Chinese-founded app used by roughly 170 million Americans now runs its US operations through a structure that gives a database software company effective oversight of the recommendation algorithm that made it famous.
The law that forced the sale
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed by Congress in April 2024, required ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations or face an app-store and hosting ban. That deadline came and went repeatedly. President Trump signed a series of executive orders delaying enforcement — most recently “Further Extending the TikTok Enforcement Delay” in September 2025 — before signing Executive Order 14352, “Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security,” on September 25, 2025. That order gave the Attorney General 120 days of non-enforcement to let a specific divestiture close, and it set the terms: the new joint venture would be based in the US, with ByteDance holding “less than 20 percent,” and with “the operation of the algorithms and code, as well as content-moderation decisions” placed under the new entity’s control, with recommendation models “retrained and monitored” by vetted US security partners.
Who owns TikTok USDS
The joint venture closed in January 2026. According to reporting from CNBC and Deadline, the equity splits roughly as follows: existing ByteDance shareholders — a mix of global institutional and family-office investors including stakes tied to Michael Dell, Susquehanna International Group and Xavier Niel, among others, none of them ByteDance itself — hold about 50%; Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold 15%; and a remaining slice sits with other new US investors. That structure satisfies the law’s “less than 20 percent” ByteDance ceiling because ByteDance’s own direct interest is a small fraction of that 50% bloc, most of which belongs to pre-existing outside shareholders rather than the Chinese parent company. The board includes Oracle’s Kenneth Glueck, Silver Lake’s Egon Durban and MGX’s David Scott alongside TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, and Adam Presser, formerly TikTok’s head of operations, was named CEO of the new venture. Will Farrell, previously TikTok’s head of trust and safety, moved into the newly created role of chief security officer, overseeing the ongoing relationship with the government-vetted security partners the executive order requires.
What Oracle actually controls
Oracle’s role goes beyond a passive equity stake. Under the deal terms reported around the closing, Oracle is responsible for validating and securing the recommendation algorithm that powers TikTok’s US “For You” feed, running the retraining process the executive order requires and hosting US user data on Oracle Cloud infrastructure — an arrangement that extends the “Project Texas” data-security relationship Oracle had with TikTok since 2022, under which Oracle already stored US TikTok data and reviewed source code for security risks. The joint venture deal deepened that role from vendor to part-owner with board representation and direct oversight of the algorithm’s retraining. The government take was substantial too: reporting cited by multiple outlets put the fee the Trump administration is set to collect for brokering the arrangement at roughly $10 billion.
No mass user exodus, but a changed privacy policy
CNBC’s February 2026 reporting found no evidence of a user exodus after the ownership change, and TikTok’s US user base and creator ecosystem have continued largely as before. What did change was the privacy policy: it now permits the joint venture to track users’ precise location, log interactions with TikTok’s AI features, and share collected data outside the app in ways the prior ByteDance-controlled entity’s policy did not — changes tied directly to the shift in ownership and data-hosting arrangements. Creators and advertisers who had spent 2025 hedging against a possible shutdown or migration to rival apps such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts largely stood down those contingency plans once the joint venture closed, according to CNBC’s reporting, treating the deal as the durable resolution rather than a temporary reprieve.
What’s still unresolved
The deal answers the ownership question that dominated 2024 and 2025, but it leaves open how independent TikTok USDS’s algorithm decisions will actually be from ByteDance’s global product, since ByteDance continues to operate TikTok everywhere outside the US and any meaningful algorithmic divergence has yet to be publicly demonstrated. It also leaves open whether the “less than 20 percent” ownership threshold, achieved partly through counting existing ByteDance shareholders as separate from ByteDance itself, will hold up if challenged as not meeting the divestiture law’s intent — the executive order’s own “qualified divestiture” finding rests on an interagency security review rather than a court ruling, and no court has yet tested that finding directly. For now, the arrangement has ended the acute deadline-extension cycle that ran through most of 2025, and TikTok’s roughly 170 million US users have kept their app.
Sources
- White House: Executive Order 14352, Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security
- CNBC: TikTok’s US joint venture lands on its feet
- Deadline: TikTok seals deal for majority US-owned joint venture
- Federal Register: Further Extending the TikTok Enforcement Delay