The U.S. version of TikTok may be purchased by an investor consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The news came a day ahead of TikTok’s Sept. 17 deadline to either be purchased by U.S. shareholders or risk being banned in the country. However, the current administration noted that the report is based on speculation.
“Any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration,” a senior White House official told TheWrap.
Representatives for TikTok, Oracle, Silver Lake or Horowitz did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The threat of a TikTok ban in the U.S. has loomed over the Chinese-owned tech company for years. It started near the end of Donald Trump’s first term in office, with the then-president signing an executive order in August 2020 banning any transactions between U.S. companies and ByteDance, the social media platform’s Chinese parent company. Soon after, Trump signed a follow-up order giving ByteDance a 90-day window to divest itself of TikTok in the United States. The potential consequence of not doing so would be a ban in the U.S.
Five years later, the threat of the ban has been kicked down the road several times over. When President Joe Biden assumed office in 2021, he repealed Trump’s executive order, buying the app more time to avoid its U.S. removal. During Biden’s term, however, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress, sharing concerns that China-based employees had accessed the personal information of American citizens through the social media service.
Toward the end of Biden’s term, he signed a bill calling for the sale or banning of TikTok. The bill gave TikTok 270 days to sell — a deadline that has long since passed. The app faced a temporary blackout in the United States in January 2025 at the time of this deadline.
When Trump returned to office in 2025, so too did his calls for a TikTok divestment. The president presented a new deadline for the company to take action in finding new U.S. owners for TikTok, which has since been delayed three times over. The latest deadline was set for Wednesday.
