Why does the agreement reportedly shaping up to finally sell (most of) popular CCP app TikTok to U.S. buyers entail the presence of only six Americans on a seven-seat board? Who gets the seventh seat?
The occasion for the Guardian’s report is the likely involvement of Fox Corporation in the TikTok deal. According to President Trump, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, and Larry Ellison, anti-privacy chairman of Oracle Corporation, will also be involved (“Trump says Rupert and Lachlan Mudoch likely part of US TikTok deal,” The Guardian, September 21, 2025).
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News on Saturday that six Americans will sit on the company’s seven-seat board—and that data and privacy would be controlled by Oracle, Ellison’s company. The US would also control the app’s data and algorithm in America, according to Leavitt.
“This deal does put America first,” Leavitt said on Saturday, invoking one of Trump’s preferred political slogans. “And let me just be very clear. This deal means that TikTok will be majority-owned by Americans in the United States.”
That is not very clear, Karoline Leavitt. Majority-owned by Americans? Majority-owned is not the same as completely owned. The law Congress passed does not say that TikTok is to be banned in the United States unless mostly divested and mostly sold to acceptable U.S. buyers. The law says America only, not America first or six out of seven.
Who is to be the seventh board member?
Privacy
Larry Ellison on privacy:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. ‘We’re going to have supervision…. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.’ ”
China has been using automated systems (including AI) to surveil its citizens for years. In 2022, Reuters reported that Chinese firms had developed AI software to sort data collected on residents using a network of surveillance cameras deployed across cities and rural areas as part of China’s “sharp eyes” campaign from 2015 to 2020. This “one person, one file” technology reportedly organizes collected data on individual Chinese citizens, leading to what The Economic Times called a “road to digital totalitarianism.”
In February 2025, Fortune reported on Ellison’s musings during a conference on how “governments need to consolidate data about citizens for the sake of AI. He said AI models can help improve government services while also saving money and cutting down on fraud.
“Larry Ellison thinks the U.S. and other countries should be using AI more, but first, governments need to unify the data they collect on citizens into one easily digestible database…. ‘We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model.’ ”
Hackers etc.
The Fortune writer points out that such hyper-centralization of data “could threaten its safety by emboldening hackers.” Fix it, says Ellison. “You need to seriously modernize your systems.”
Of course, even if the magic wand gets waved and everything gets fixed, there will still be ways to enter the system illicitly, because many government functionaries and officials, who can be bribed or scammed or be sloppy, will have authority to enter the centralized database. The AI will also have access, and AI thingies don’t always behave predictably.
Now, just because Larry Ellison wants to monitor all of us all the time and give an all-consuming AI all the data on us doesn’t mean that Ellison will fail to be a good steward of privacy as a board member of TikTok. Anyone can instantly reconstitute all his impulses and theories late in life.
The seventh board member
According to one report, President Trump “declined to say who the seventh board member would be, saying that would be announced at a later date.” Will it be someone appointed by Beijing-based ByteDance, i.e., by the Chinese Communist Party? Which would continue as minority owner of TikTok? Which would mean that Xi Jinping did not really “approve” giving up control of TikTok during his call with Trump the other day?
Oracle, by the way, is one of the U.S. companies that has abetted China’s surveillance and repression.
Also see:
The Intercept: How Oracle Sells Repression in China (February 18, 2021)
“In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work.”
