So TikTok didn’t die. It got a makeover instead.
After a year of legal gymnastics and that brief moment when the app actually vanished from US app stores, TikTok is now technically American. Well, sort of. The app you’re still scrolling at 2 AM is now owned by something called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a corporate entity that sounds like it was named by a committee of lawyers who hate vowels.
ByteDance kept 19.9 percent. Everything else got divvied up among an investment consortium that reads like a who’s who of tech and finance heavy hitters. Silver Lake, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX each grabbed 15 percent stakes as “managing investors.” Then there’s Michael Dell’s family office, a chunk going to Susquehanna International Group, and a handful of other firms with enough capital to make this whole thing happen.
The Numbers Game Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s what the press release conveniently left out: how much did this actually cost? We don’t know. They’re not saying. Which is interesting because when you’re restructuring one of the most popular apps on the planet, you’d think someone might want to brag about the price tag.
What we do know is that this deal covers more than just TikTok. CapCut, that video editor everyone uses to make their content look professional, is part of the package. So is Lemon8, ByteDance’s Instagram wannabe that never quite caught fire. There’s apparently a “portfolio” of other apps and services too, though nobody’s spelling out what those are.
The joint venture’s mandate sounds reassuring on paper. US user data locked in Oracle’s cloud. Algorithm retraining on American data only. Third-party audits and certifications up the wazoo. They’re ticking every box that regulators demanded, from NIST standards to CISA requirements.
Who’s Actually Running This Thing
The new board has seven members, including Shou Zi Chew, who’s still TikTok’s US CEO. The actual CEO of the joint venture is Adam Presser, who previously ran operations, trust, and safety at TikTok. So it’s largely the same people running the show, just with different org charts and presumably very different reporting structures.
This creates a weird split personality situation. ByteDance’s US entities still handle “global product interoperability” and commercial stuff like e-commerce, advertising, and marketing. The joint venture handles data security, content moderation, and trust and safety. Try explaining that structure at a party.
The whole thing hinges on this concept of “interoperability” that lets US users still feel like they’re part of global TikTok. American creators can still blow up internationally. Businesses can still run global campaigns. But your data supposedly stays here, and the algorithm learns from American scrolling habits instead of whatever ByteDance was doing before.
The Real Question Everyone’s Avoiding
Does any of this actually solve the problem Congress was worried about?
The divest-or-ban law that Biden signed in 2024 was about national security concerns. The fear was Chinese government influence over what Americans see, what data gets collected, how the algorithm shapes public discourse. ByteDance may only own 19.9 percent now, but they’re still in the room. They still have a seat at the table.
Oracle’s involvement is supposed to be the security blanket here. They’re the “Trusted Security Partner” reviewing source code and making sure nothing sketchy happens in the background. But Oracle is also a commercial partner with skin in the game. They’re hosting the infrastructure, they’re part of the consortium. It’s not exactly an arms-length audit relationship.
The technology behind content recommendation algorithms isn’t simple either. Retraining it on US data sounds good, but algorithms are black boxes built on years of development and optimization. You can’t just swap out the training data and call it a completely new system. The architecture, the design choices, the fundamental approach to engagement, that’s all still there.
What happens when the joint venture’s trust and safety team disagrees with ByteDance’s global team about what content is acceptable? Who wins that fight? The press release doesn’t say, probably because nobody wants to think about it yet.
American ownership was supposed to make TikTok safe, but what we got instead is a complicated corporate structure that satisfies legal requirements while keeping most of the actual app unchanged, and maybe that was the point all along.