‘I’ll tell you in about two weeks, a big technology company … it’s a group of very wealthy people,’ the president said.
President Donald Trump said on June 29 that he has found a buyer for the Chinese-owned short video application TikTok, and that he will reveal the group in roughly two weeks.
Trump made the comments in an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
He had signed an executive order on June 19 extending the deadline for the sale of TikTok by another 90 days, giving the company until Sept. 17 to divest itself from its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States.
However, Trump signaled on Sunday that TikTok might not need until the end of the summer to reach a divestment deal.
“I’m extending that [deadline], but no big deal. We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way. I think I‘ll need probably China’s approval. I think President Xi will probably do it,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you in about two weeks, a big technology company … it’s a group of very wealthy people.”
The recent extension was the third time Trump had granted a reprieve to the enforcement of a law that Congress passed last year mandating that TikTok divest itself from ByteDance by January or go dark in the United States. Lawmakers cited national security concerns due to ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
In a March 2024 hearing, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that ByteDance’s algorithm, coupled with the U.S. user data that TikTok collects, would enable influence operations that are “extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by TikTok so significant.”
The site briefly went dark in the United States for several hours when the initial deadline passed in January, but Trump said days before his inauguration that he would sign an executive order giving TikTok additional time to find a buyer. That announcement brought TikTok back onto U.S.-based app stores until Trump signed the order on Jan. 20.
Trump said in March that he would consider lowering tariffs on China to encourage ByteDance to sell the app, but a deal to spin off TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new American firm was put on hold.
By Jacob Burg
