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The future of the video application Tiktok in the US seems assured after President Donald Trump (74) approved an agreement between the Chinese owner Bytedance and American companies. Tiktok’s global business will be in a new US-based company, “probably in Texas,” Trump said Sunday night. “I have approved the deal.” The agreement “will have nothing to do with China. It will be absolutely safe, ”Trump said.
A formal lifting of US measures against Tiktok is still pending. The Commerce Department postponed the app’s download stop in the US, which should take effect for users starting Monday, by a week.
Trump called Tiktok a security risk because the app belongs to the Chinese Bytedance group. In his opinion, the Chinese authorities could have obtained data from Americans through the application. By following this reasoning, he laid the groundwork for exiting the application in the US with two orders. Tiktok and Bytedance replied to no avail that US user data is stored in the United States and does not go to China.
25,000 new jobs and a “brand new company”
After the agreement, which has already been approved, the software company Oracle will process all the data of the US users and take care of the associated technical systems. Trump and Tiktok announced that 25,000 jobs would be created in the United States.
A central Trump demand was also that American investors have a majority in Tiktok. Additionally, it was only officially announced that Oracle will take a 12.5 percent stake in the company ahead of an initial public offering from Tiktok Global and that supermarket giant Walmart will hold 7.5 percent.
At the same time, the “Wall Street Journal” reported that Bytedance would keep the remaining 80 percent of Tiktok Global. But: Given that American investors like startup finance companies Sequoia and General Atlantic in turn owned about 40 percent of Bytedance, one could speak of an American majority on Tiktok, people informed the newspaper told. Trump had previously announced: “It will be a completely new company. It will have nothing to do with China. “
Backed up data
New construction could have the advantage that the deal would not require Chinese government approval. The leadership in Beijing had previously torpedoed a direct sale of the US Tiktok business to the software company Microsoft. It introduced a new rule according to which software algorithms can only be sold abroad with the permission of the authorities.
Trump, for his part, had rejected a deal in which Oracle would act as Tiktok’s technology partner with a minority stake a few days ago. The Commerce Department then started a countdown for Tiktok to be kicked out of American app stores. Tiktok and Bytedance filed a lawsuit in Washington.
Billions for education funding in Texas
What’s new is that Tiktok will now transfer $ 5 billion to an education fund in Texas, as Trump said at an election campaign appearance in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He had previously requested that the United States government obtain some kind of commission to achieve the agreement. The education fund must ensure “that the real history of our country is taught,” Trump said. A few days ago he announced the formation of a commission to promote patriotic education; the Republican justified it by the fact that the historical importance of slavery was currently being exaggerated.
Tiktok already had a cloud agreement with another US company: Amazon’s IT affiliate, AWS. Trump has attracted more attention in the past with attacks on the online retailer’s founder and boss, Jeff Bezos. Bezos is the private owner of the Washington Post newspaper, in which Trump is often criticized. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, on the other hand, is one of the most prominent Trump supporters in Silicon Valley. Walmart, on the other hand, is a competitor to Amazon. (kes / SDA)
