Trump Says He Found a Buyer for TikTok

‘I’ll tell you in about two weeks, a big technology company ... it’s a group of very wealthy people,' the president said.

A man holds a phone displaying the TikTok app on Aug. 11, 2024. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times

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’s “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 separate itself from its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States.

However, Trump signaled on June 29 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 in 2024 mandating that ByteDance divest itself of its ownership of TikTok 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.

“We had a deal pretty much for TikTok—not a deal but pretty close—and then China changed the deal because of the tariffs,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on April 6. “If I gave a little cut in tariffs, they’d approve that deal in 15 minutes, which shows you the power of tariffs.”

As a result of the collapse in negotiations with the Chinese regime at the time, Trump extended the divest-or-ban deadline a second time on April 4.

“My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”

After pushing the deadline to June 19, Trump signaled in early May that he was open to extending the deadline a third time because of the “little sweet spot” in his heart over the application’s popularity among young Americans, to which he partially attributed his electoral success in 2024.

“I’d like to see [a deal] done,” Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “TikTok is—it’s very interesting, but it will be protected. It will be very strongly protected. But if it needs an extension, I would be willing to give it an extension, might not need it.”

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.