NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump and top U.S. officials were to meet at the White House on Tuesday afternoon to consider a proposal by China’s ByteDance to keep majority ownership of its popular TikTok video app, people familiar with the matter said.
Trump has ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok amid U.S. concerns that user data could be passed on to China’s Communist Party government. He has threatened to ban TikTok in the United States as early as Sept. 20 if ByteDance does not comply.
Under ByteDance’s proposal, however, the Beijing-based company would keep a majority stake in TikTok’s global business and move its headquarters to the United States, the sources said. Oracle Corp would become ByteDance’s technology partner responsible for the management of TikTok’s data and take a minority stake in TikTok, the sources added.
The ByteDance proposal also calls for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the U.S. government panel that is overseeing the deal talks, to supervise how TikTok will be operated, one of the sources said.
It is unclear whether Trump will approve ByteDance’s proposal, the sources said, requesting anonymity because the deliberations are confidential. The White House, ByteDance and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Reporting by David Shepardson and Alexandra Alper in Washington, D.C. and Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)
