Vice President JD Vance is confident that a “high-level” purchase of TikTok will happen before a law banning the social media app in the US takes effect April 5.
“There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise,” Vance, 40, told NBC News Friday about the ongoing negotiations to secure a US buyer.
“Typically, some of these deals that are much smaller and involve much less capital take months to close,” he added. “We’re trying to close this thing by early April. I think that the outlines of this thing will be very clear. The question is whether we can get all the paper done.”
President Trump signed an executive order on Day One allowing for a 75-day reprieve from a law — passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis and signed by his predecessor — that forces a qualified divestment of the app from its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
The roughly 170 million users on TikTok have content brought to them from a unique algorithm owned by ByteDance, alarming US officials who have noted its ability to hoover up US users’ data and potentially share it with the Chinese government.
In January, the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law mandating TikTok’s sale from its Beijing-based parent company, citing “well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
Vance said he believes the negotiators working on the deal are “going to be in a place where we can say TikTok is operational, and it’s also operational in a way that’s protective of Americans’ data privacy and America’s national security” by the law’s “early April” deadline.
Federal Communications Commission commissioner Brendan Carr had nearly three years ago asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, referring to its “sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
“TikTok collects everything from search and browsing histories to keystroke patterns and biometric identifiers, including faceprints… and voiceprints,” the FCC leader wrote in a June 2022 letter.
The high court’s ruling immediately prompted US officials led by Vance and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz to seek an American purchaser of the app — with billionaire Larry Ellison’s tech firm Oracle reportedly becoming the “leading contender” in recent weeks.
On Sunday, however, Trump revealed his admin’s team of TikTok brokers were “dealing with four different groups” on the purchase — without listing any.
Longshot bids for the app have also been floated by Wyoming entrepreneur Reid Rasner, who offered $47.45 billion, The Post first reported.
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian has also joined with billionaire Frank McCourt to enter the bid talks.
The president had promised to “save TikTok” before taking office and told reporters he was willing to extend again past the April deadline in order to find the right buyer.
Vance, a former venture capitalist who was elected to the US Senate in 2022 before departing for the Trump White House, told NBC he’d prefer “to get it done without the extension.”
“I think the question is, what is the equity ownership of the new joint venture? How do you do the contracts for all the investors, the customers, the service providers?” he asked.
“The deal itself will be very clear, but actually creating those thousands and thousands of pages of legal documents, that’s the one thing that I worry could slip.”
