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OPINION:
President Trump on Thursday announced an executive order that kicks off a possible transfer of TikTok to American investors, and the platform’s algorithm to Oracle. It’s subject to a final term agreement within an 180-day period. Yet much remains to determined, and our organization, Future Union, remains skeptical that Chinese President Xi Jinping will give final approval without a sweetened side deal involving a level of control or continued access to information.
Let’s call this what it is: a negotiated surrender.
President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping has “approved” a TikTok deal, and the White House has postponed the sell-or-ban deadline to Dec. 16. The structure being floated maintains the app’s operation in America despite continuing Chinese ties.
Let’s stop pretending this is a culture war. It’s a power, data and capital war, one we are choosing to lose.
TikTok is not allowed to operate in China, but it dominates the attention of American teenagers and 20-somethings because advertising budgets and American capital chose it.
Last year, our research at Future Union mapped the money trail. U.S. public pensions have roughly $8.1 billion committed to funds with ByteDance investments; university endowments tally about $1 billion more; major nonprofits and foundations are in the mix, especially the Robert Wood Johnson, the MacArthur and the Mellon foundations, helping finance the Chinese Communist Party’s most effective propaganda tool.
This is not incidental. China’s government holds a “golden share” and a board seat in a key ByteDance subsidiary, embedding state leverage by design. Project Texas posits a structure in which a U.S. company, Oracle, would host all U.S. data. Yet any “deal” that preserves ownership, licensing or algorithmic influence, keeping America’s information environment downstream of a regime that can compel cooperation, is illusory. The threat is not just access to data but also the ability to steer the feed.
The law drew a bright-line rule. Will it be upheld?
Congress passed and the president signed divest-or-ban legislation. In January, the Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality. The message was clear: ByteDance can no longer control more than 20% of ByteDance in America. Continued Chinese control directly contravenes congressional legislative intent and broad judicial consensus.
The criticism is in the content
After the surprise Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, investigative analysis showed that pro-Palestinian narratives surged on TikTok while factual counter-narratives languished. Israeli leaders publicly confronted TikTok over manipulation and hostile bot activity. This highlights the strategic vulnerability of propaganda: An adversary-aligned platform can nudge real-time worldview.
Follow the incentives, and you’ll find the proposed “deal.”
ByteDance reportedly generated $120 billion in revenue last year and nearly $40 billion in profit. A “deal” today solidifies artificially inflated valuations as the floor for initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions, conversely conveying that national security risks are mitigatable issues and negotiable in future deals.
What does such a surrender buy TikTok? Legitimacy restored. The stigma that kept top engineers away fades. Hiring accelerates. Lobbying surges.
The mergers and acquisitions spigot reopens. With political risk “solved,” TikTok can buy growth, bolt on capabilities and entrench — precisely the playbook of Big Tech after core product peak. Leakage institutionalized. Even if TikTok is hosted by the U.S., American intellectual property, behavioral data and civic discourse remain exposed to a Chinese regime that compels cooperation.
Outsized risks of the negotiation
A deal with China would have profound implications, dissipating the stain of working for Chinese ByteDance, thereby restoring hiring to a company infamous for data theft. It also reconstitutes TikTok with an important lifeline to pursue mergers and acquisitions and investments, especially in a category littered with platform churn such as MySpace, Vine and Clubhouse.
The staying power of the current generation of technological platforms remained relevant because of strategic acquisitions that lengthened product cycles. Meta purchased Instagram and WhatsApp. Alphabet purchased YouTube, DoubleClick and DeepMind Technologies. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn and GitHub and partnered with OpenAI. All effectively rearm the flagship parents. TikTok could soon have an opportunity to create Facebook- or Google-level staying power on a Chinese-tethered product.
Expect a TikTok successor entity to announce a venture capital arm (perhaps an eponymous “TikTok Ventures”) to seed startups, plying money for access, influence and IP theft, a playbook China has used for a decade to exploit private capital markets.
What a negotiated agreement costs us
• Information integrity from normalizing a foreign influence risk at an industrial scale.
• Industrial policy by rewarding the most successful Chinese consumer technology exports instead of homegrown talent.
• Capital discipline by signaling that national security issues are negotiable so long as the returns are large enough, and publicly funded through pensions, endowments and foundations.
This isn’t Main Street vs. Silicon Valley; it’s Main Street underwriting Wall Street. The teachers and firefighters whose savings sit in the funds behind ByteDance are not voting in investment committees. They are being drafted, without consent, into an experiment in surrender by structure. Our pensioners’ beneficiaries deserve to know when their retirement dollars are propping up a platform that our own government deemed a national security risk.
A 2028 test that starts now
For every would-be governor or senator auditioning for 2028, now is the time to make this decision a cornerstone issue.
There is a straightforward standard that respects the law, the courts and common sense: full divestment of code, control and capital. No licensing ruses. No algorithm “trusts.” No data-hosting theater. That is not censorship. It is sovereignty.
Anything short of a clean break is capitulation dressed as compliance, and the algorithm will remember who surrendered.
• Andrew King is an investor at Bastille Ventures, investing in critical national security technologies, and president of Future Union, an organization leveraging the private sector to combat adversarial states. He was the general counsel of the Dallas Stars NHL team and an investment banker.
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