The TikTok deal is done, but it ended up having the worst possible outcome

The Trump TikTok deal is finally done, and honestly, it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes. This is truly impressive, as the resulting structure manages to make the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse while achieving none of the stated goals. You’re probably wondering who exactly signed off on this mess.

The Chinese government actually approved the deal, which involves offloading a huge chunk of the company to some highly questionable figures. The new ownership includes billionaire right-wing Trump ally Larry Ellison, fresh off his acquisition of CBS. We also have the private equity firm Silver Lake, which has broad global investments in Israeli and Chinese hyper-surveillance, and MGX, which is Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm. This isn’t exactly a list of privacy champions, is it?

As reported by Techdirt, the new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” who will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another five percent will be owned by other new investors, which may or may not include folks like Rupert Murdoch. Here’s the kicker: ByteDance retains 19.9 percent, and affiliates of existing ByteDance investors hold another 30.1 percent. That means the supposedly problematic Chinese investment is still huge.

It’s absolutely baffling that they shifted ownership to President Trump’s buddies while still maintaining the so-called problematic tethers to the Chinese

It’s worth noting that technically, none of this was legal. The law stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way while President Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at this ownership transfer. The administration claimed the deal involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.” Oracle is also supposed to be “overseeing data protection.”

Given the long history of privacy abuses by Oracle’s authoritarian-enabling billionaire owner, and the track record of everyone else involved, you can’t trust any of those companies. What’s truly bizarre is that everyone seems to have forgotten that during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. This whole new arrangement just shifted the ownership structure to give President Trump and his friends a political win.

The goal was never subtle. It was always for Trump’s buddies to steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short-form video company that U.S. tech companies simply couldn’t out-innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was President Trump’s stated goal during his first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else has just been decorative theater, just like his White House renovation antics.

You might recall that Republicans like Brendan Carr spent years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. Now, their ultimate solution is to shift partial ownership over to President Trump’s autocratic buddies while keeping the Chinese involvement. With the problem arguably made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.