Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
It looks like President Donald Trump has reached a deal with China on TikTok.
Trump said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
The administration was facing a Sept. 17 deadline to either divest TikTok’s U.S. business or shut down the social media app in the country. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
Trump said he will speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.
Last year, Congress passed a law prohibiting companies such as app store operators Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. given its status as a “foreign adversary-controlled application.” Companies would face fines for not complying.
Trump has previously spoken about his qualms with TikTok, telling CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat.
In January Trump signed an executive order giving ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive order in April and in June.
Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to by the social media platform and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
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