In January 2025, the prevailing thought in Washington was that President Donald Trump‘s push to broker a deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States was nothing more than a pipe dream. The president himself had explored banning the app during his first term,

The long running fight over TikTok’s future in the United States has finally produced a concrete answer: a new American led joint venture is taking control of the app’s U.S. business, while its Beijing based parent,

Ellison has made plenty of news outside of TikTok of late. He has been pursuing American media giant Warner Brothers Discovery, with a hostile bid against Netflix. And last year, he closed on a deal that puts the Ellison family in charge of another major media company, Paramount. (The BBC is a partner of Paramount’s CBS News.)

This is your periodic reminder that TikTok could still be banned in the U.S., because as of right now, despite various assurances from the Trump administration that a deal will be done ahead of the current extension deadline, there’s been no official statement from TikTok, nor parent company ByteDance, to confirm that any such deal is in place.

A year past the original deadline, TikTok users are celebrating after the app’s owner finalized a deal late Thursday to spin off the bulk of its U.S. business to a consortium of American investors. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of the terms.

The app was due to be banned in the US a year ago if its Chinese owner hadn't sold its business in America.

One of President Donald Trump’s biggest abuses of power remains how he ignored a law signed by Congress to get a deal on TikTok. The result is a deal that does not even meet the standards that Congress set out in the first place.

TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years on the platform now used by more than 200 million Americans.