By Jessica Toonkel, Dana Mattioli, Alex Leary and Josh Dawsey

President Trump has been a real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star. Now he's playing a new role as he oversees TikTok's fate: investment banker.

In public and behind the scenes, Trump has discussed possible deals to Americanize control of the Chinese-controlled app he once tried to ban, promoting it as a prize asset for tech titans to bid over, a potential target for a planned American sovereign-wealth fund, and a valuable chip in trade negotiations with Beijing.

"GREAT INTEREST IN TIKTOK! Would be wonderful for China, and all concerned," he posted recently on Truth Social.

Several companies have privately expressed interest in participating in a deal for TikTok or its American operations, including Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft, according to people familiar with the matter. TikTok and its backers, meanwhile, are pushing for solutions that might forego a sale in favor of reviving a plan the company says would wall off American users' data.

Last week, TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew met with senior White House officials and offered a proposal that envisioned a joint venture with U.S. investors. That new venture would be headquartered in the U.S. and oversee data security, according to a person familiar with the proposal. Management would be U.S.-based and a board of directors would be a majority U.S.

Whether the investors include the U.S. government itself is an open question. Trump on Monday ordered the creation of a sovereign-wealth fund and suggested it could be used to acquire TikTok -- something many observers see as far-fetched.

Trump, meantime, has tasked Vice President JD Vance with overseeing negotiations, with the hope Vance's background in venture capital and Silicon Valley ties can facilitate a deal.

Hope and confusion

Trump's role and his recent enthusiasm for the app have fueled optimism in TikTok's camp that it will get a solution to stay in the U.S. long term. It faces an April 5 deadline, although Trump could extend that.

But his maneuvers also have ignited confusion over what any such deal would look like and who would be involved.

"The president has made it clear he wants TikTok to continue. He has determined as dealmaker-in-chief that he will find a path forward," said a person close to the company. But the person added that talk of a sovereign fund had muddied the conversation. "We don't even have a sovereign-wealth fund yet...We don't have time to wait."

Trump's executive order on inauguration day set a 75-day delay in enforcement of a bipartisan law passed last year requiring TikTok to shed its Chinese ownership or close in the U.S. The law's proponents argue that China's government could pressure its Chinese parent, ByteDance, to use TikTok to surveil or propagandize Americans -- a claim TikTok has disputed.

Trump has indicated a range of potential outcomes, at times suggesting a U.S. company or even the U.S. itself should own TikTok and at other times indicating U.S. investors could just increase their stakes in its parent company.

ByteDance has said that it is already roughly 60% owned by global institutional investors, many of which are big U.S. financial firms -- including BlackRock, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group, co-founded by Republican megadonor Jeff Yass.

After trying to ban TikTok in 2020, Trump embraced it during the latest presidential campaign, in part because he came to view it as a powerful political tool. He was partially persuaded by Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser in his first term who has worked on behalf of TikTok allies to advocate for it. She told him he had more supporters on the platform than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden -- and that many young people made videos in his favor. She also conducted polling that showed Americans didn't see banning TikTok as the best way to counter China.

In a December meeting with TikTok's CEO at Mar-a-Lago, Trump phoned his son, Barron, and bragged about his statistics on the platform and told Barron that the company's CEO had flown in to see him. "I'm going to save TikTok," he told an adviser after that meeting.

A deal for TikTok is now expected to be part of broader talks on trade and tariffs that play out over the coming month. Trump had been expected to speak this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping but that hadn't happened as of late Friday. White House staff have been engaging with Chinese counterparts, according to people briefed on those discussions, as they look to define parameters for talks. The two discussed TikTok, among other issues, in a Jan. 17 call.

In Beijing, Chinese officials have told ByteDance that they were interested in reaching a deal with the U.S. to resolve the dispute and were open to the option of a U.S. sovereign-wealth fund investing in TikTok for a significant stake, people familiar with the matter said. They said they hoped that a deal could help Beijing with negotiations for tariffs and other issues.

Talking up a bidding war

Trump has encouraged potential suitors in an apparent effort to stoke maximum interest. "I like bidding wars because you make your best deal. So if there's a bidding war, that's a good thing," he told reporters while traveling on Air Force One late last month.

On his second day in office, he told a room of reporters he would support Elon Musk buying the app. Then he added that he would also welcome Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman, buying it. Asked on the Air Force One trip whether Microsoft could play a role, Trump said: "I would say yes. A lot of interest in TikTok."

A few days later he floated the idea that the U.S. could buy half of TikTok, before this week saying he wants to establish the U.S. sovereign-wealth fund.

Trump has said that his power to decide TikTok's fate should entitle the U.S. government to a sizable stake in whatever entity emerges. "If I sign, then somebody's gonna buy it, pay a lot of money, have a lot of jobs, keep a platform open and have it be very secure. If I don't sign, then it closes," he said.

His role has so far left actual investment banks on the sidelines of what could be one of the biggest deals in recent history, boxing out the bankers who typically provide more clarity to potential bidders.

"It is unprecedented for a president to introduce himself into a sale of a private asset," said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in technology. "Typically presidents trust the market to do those things."

Trump tried something similar in his first term. After initiating an effort to ban TikTok, he blessed a tentative deal to save it in which Oracle and Walmart would have taken stakes in a U.S.-based TikTok. The agreement never materialized.

Investor consortia are cropping up with vastly different ideas on how a deal could be structured. One led by billionaire Frank McCourt -- which counts as a partner Kevin O'Leary, a star on "Shark Tank" known as Mr. Wonderful -- proposes a bid worth more than $20 billion.

Another investor group pitched the idea of investing in a special purpose vehicle that would buy TikTok and invest in Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, with the idea that it would run TikTok's algorithm, according to someone familiar with the group.

ByteDance and its investors aim to convince Trump that an earlier plan by the company to transfer U.S. user data to Oracle's cloud satisfies security concerns, people close to the company said.

TikTok started crafting that initiative, dubbed Project Texas, during Trump's previous administration in an effort to convince the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. that the company could satisfy American national security concerns without separating from its Chinese parent company.

TikTok executives believed Trump would have approved Project Texas as the solution to lawmakers' concerns had he won re-election in 2020. Instead, negotiations with Washington about the initiative fell apart under President Biden.

--Miriam Gottfried, Georgia Wells and Raffaele Huang contributed to this article.

Write to Jessica Toonkel at jessica.toonkel@wsj.com, Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com, Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 08, 2025 11:04 ET (16:04 GMT)

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