It appears TikTok may finally have a U.S. buyer after years of extending the deadline to find one, and Stephen Colbert thinks the candidate is “perfect.”
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz is in final talks to purchase the app. During his monologue on Wednesday night, Colbert celebrated the potential sale by first reacting on his “TikTok Cam.”
“You ate that, King. Six seven. Labubu!” he deadpanned.
The CBS host then gave his audience a bit more detail about the potential buyers.
“It’s a group led by Oracle, which is owned by the richest man in the world, Larry Ellison,” he explained. “He’s perfect, because nothing says TikTok like an 81-year-old guy named Larry.”
You can watch Stephen Colbert’s full monologue in the video above.
It’s unclear if the deal will go through, as representatives for TikTok, Oracle, Silver Lake and Horowitz did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. Meanwhile, a senior White House official told TheWrap that “any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration.”
The threat of banning TikTok in the U.S. has been present for years, beginning in President Trump’s first term.
In August 2020, Trump signed an executive order banning any transactions between U.S. companies and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Shortly thereafter, he signed a follow-up order giving ByteDance a 90-day window to divest itself of TikTok in the United States or be banned in the country.
When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he repealed Trump’s executive order, giving the company more time. But, in 2024, the House of Representatives, Senate and Biden passed a bill requiring the sale.
When he returned to office, Trump vowed to “save” TikTok from what began with his own orders. The deadline to find a buyer has since been extended four times up through Wednesday, and the White House joined the platform in August of this year.
