Vice President J.D. Vance will lead the effort to find a U.S. buyer for TikTok before the latest extension of the ban runs out in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement who spoke to NBC News. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz will work alongside him. Their job is to oversee a divestiture deal between TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, and an American entity, as Congress required.
Neither side has shown its hand. It is not clear what arrangement, if any, ByteDance and China will accept. Trump recently floated 50/50 American and Chinese joint ownership, but the situation is still moving, and nobody knows whether a split like that would settle the national security worries behind the ban. A number of U.S. suitors are competing for the app in the meantime.
How the deadline came about
The ban was due to take effect on Jan. 19 under a bipartisan law signed by then-President Joe Biden. TikTok challenged it, and the Supreme Court upheld the law in the last days of the Biden administration. TikTok has always said it does not share its U.S. users’ data with the Chinese government.
On Jan. 18 the app went dark in the United States. It came back about 12 hours later, after Trump indicated he would review the ban and would not penalize the app or the stores that carry it. On Jan. 19, the day before his inauguration, TikTok sent users a push notification crediting him.
On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order telling the Attorney General not to enforce the law for 75 days. Before that, many TikTok users had downloaded a similar Chinese app, RedNote, in protest of the ban, which added security and censorship concerns of its own.
Users who kept TikTok on their phones can still open it and post as before during the 75-day pause. Google and Apple are not currently offering it in their app stores. A Trump administration official said the Justice Department and the executive order make clear that neither company faces penalties for offering it, and that the White House will not tell private firms what they can carry. The order says no action will be taken to enforce the Act or impose penalties for noncompliance.
Leverage and lawmakers
Trump has since put an additional 10% tariff on China, on top of those already in place, which may make ByteDance less willing to deal with Washington.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who is ranking member of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, told NBC News the opposite could also hold. ByteDance may be more open to a sale now that it has run out of options to keep control. “There’s only so much they can try to do to change the law, it all failed,” he said. He added that prospective American buyers, from the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, to the billionaire Frank McCourt, have been “lining up.”
Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who backed the divestment law, said TikTok should stay available to Americans but be cut loose from ByteDance. “I’m a father. I’ve heard from my kids, my teenage kids, about this a lot,” he said, adding that he also focuses on national security. “We structured it that way because we don’t want to end the platform.”
