Donald Trump has said the US and China are close to finalising a deal that would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States, with a new group of American investors led by Oracle set to take control of the app’s security and licence its recommendation algorithm. In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Trump named media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, along with Dell chief executive Michael Dell, as investors in the arrangement, which he said has the tentative backing of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Under the reported terms, TikTok in the US would gain a seven-member board of directors, six of them American. It is considered likely that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, chief executive of Paramount Skydance, will occupy some of those seats. Lachlan Murdoch, 54, is executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, and took control after a legal settlement with siblings in September. CNN reported that Fox’s parent company is likely to make the investment rather than the Murdochs individually.
For the elder Murdoch, involvement in TikTok would mark a second attempt at social media after News Corp’s disastrous $580m purchase of Myspace in 2005. The site briefly became the most-visited in the US but was soon overtaken by Facebook, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg now has a net worth roughly ten times that of Rupert Murdoch, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
Larry Ellison, 81, is co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, a company worth nearly $900bn, and holds around 40 per cent of its shares. He briefly overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest person after strong earnings earlier this month. A longtime Trump donor, he hosted a fundraiser for the president at his California estate in 2020 and owns almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. His son David, 42, recently completed a merger bringing Paramount under the Skydance umbrella and is reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer for Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO and DC Comics.
In the months before the Paramount merger, CBS News made several moves seen as favourable to Trump, including settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as ombudsman and courting former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. The tactics may offer clues as to how David Ellison would approach leading TikTok. Should the deal proceed, the concentration of media power in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be vast and unprecedented.
