U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the United States and China are ready to advance the TikTok transaction. Bessant previously revealed last month that the two countries had reached a "framework agreement" on the TikTok deal during negotiations in Madrid, and then US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to promote the deal.
In this Sunday's CBS "Face the Nation" program, Bessant said that the United States and China have "reached a final agreement on TikTok."
"We have reached an agreement in Madrid and I believe that as of today all the details have been finalized and it will be up to the two leaders to formally complete the deal in South Korea this Thursday," Bessant said. He declined to disclose details of the agreement, but added: "My task was to get China to agree to the deal, and I believe we have successfully accomplished that goal in the past two days."
Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a U.S. ban. According to its executive order, TikTok's U.S. operations (including recommendation algorithms, source code and content review) will be taken over by a new board of directors, and security operations will be handled by Oracle (the company is led by Trump ally Larry Ellison). Fox Company (owner of Fox News), Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake Management are reported to be investors in the new joint venture. Fox Company’s participation has been confirmed by Trump.
Bessant made the above statement that day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. U.S.-China trade negotiators also stated that the two sides had reached an agreement on a framework on tariffs and other trade issues. U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer told reporters that rare earth minerals are also under discussion, but did not elaborate (China has announced that it will once again tighten export controls on these minerals that are critical to the manufacture of semiconductors and other technology products).
"We talked about extending the trade truce, we talked about rare earths, we talked about all sorts of topics," Greer said.