WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump said on Sunday that media mogul Lachlan Murdoch and business leaders Larry Ellison and Michael Dell would be involved as U.S. investors in a proposed deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States.
Trump has said that the U.S. and China have made progress on a deal requiring TikTok’s American assets to be transferred to U.S. owners from China’s ByteDance.
The proposed investors would give Trump allies in corporate America influence over a widely popular social media app, which counts 170 million U.S. users and helps shape public discourse on politics and culture.
Trump praised the group in an interview with Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing” program, calling them prominent people and “American patriots.”
“I think they’re going to do a really good job,” Trump said, crediting TikTok with helping build his support among young voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corp, recently cemented long-term control of his family’s media empire that includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal after settling a years-long legal battle with his siblings. The family patriarch, 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch, may also be involved in the deal, Trump said.
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are known for their conservative views and their news outlets attract right-leaning audiences, but they have occasionally drawn Trump’s ire.
Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for defamation over a July report that said Trump signed a 2003 birthday greeting for late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to shared secrets. The newspaper has defended its reporting and vowed to fight the lawsuit.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and a major Republican donor, has long been linked to a potential TikTok deal. Dell is the CEO of Dell Technologies .
The Trump administration has declined to enforce a U.S. law enacted during the Biden administration requiring TikTok’s divestiture over fears its U.S. user data could be accessed by the Chinese government. Trump has included negotiations over the app as part of wide-ranging economic talks with China.
The Trump administration has made a series of unusual interventions in U.S. business, including taking a 10% stake in Intel Corp and allowing AI chip giant Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to China in exchange for receiving 15% of those sales.
Trump has defended those moves as benefiting U.S. interests. Critics, including some business leaders and Republican lawmakers, have called the interventions a stark departure from the norms of American capitalism and said they risk hurting the competitiveness of the U.S. economy.
(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya in Toronto and Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Editing by Rami Ayyub and Mark Porter)
