Good question from the BBC: “How do you buy a company that’s not for sale?”
We have U.S. buyers with enough dough to buy TikTok from Beijing-based ByteDance: more buyers every minute. And a few days ago, JD Vance had told Fox News that the Trump administration would announce a deal before the Saturday, April 5 deadline.
But no deal will be happening. Not right now.
There was about to be a deal, reports The New York Post. It was all set. It was ready to go. But “ByteDance pulled out after new Trump tariffs” (April 4, 2024).
By Wednesday, White House officials had worked out an arrangement for Trump to sign an executive order authorizing the sale of the social media app from its Chinese parent company ByteDance to a company majority-owned by US investors.
That would have moved the Beijing-based firm into a minority-ownership position, in line with legislation forcing the qualified divestment that had been passed by Congress and signed by then-President Joe Biden.
It also would have extended a Saturday deadline for the sale by another four months to figure out the financing and complete required paperwork.
But Trump’s decision to follow through on his sweeping tariff plan—with additional 34% duties on China—prompted ByteDance reps to call off the deal until China and the US hold talks about future trade and tariffs.
Despite the lack of any deal, President Trump has re-extended the deadline by which a sale “must” take place or by which at least the vague shape of the outline of a promise of a sale must take place: 75 days from April 5.
More work to ensure
As he explained on Truth Social: “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed. We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs.”
ByteDance has issued a statement dated April 4, 2025: “ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. Government regarding a potential solution for TikTok U.S. An agreement has not been executed. There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law [i.e., subject to approval by the Chinese Communist Party].”
It sounds as if ByteDance (and thus the CCP) now regard the sale as contingent upon whether Trump tosses or slashes Trump’s tariffs on China. Getting CCP approval for the sale would not be a good reason for changing U.S. tariff policy toward China. Yet Trump has already suggested and still suggests that he may reduce the tariffs to give the Chinese Communist Party an incentive to permit ByteDance to sell.
“Deadline” in the loose sense
Meanwhile, each many-day extension of the “deadline” by which a sale “must” take place if a ban of TikTok in the U.S. is to be avoided or by which a sale must at least be within measurable distance of beginning to be consummated gives the CCP more time to do the propagandistic and data-collecting things, via TikTok, that are the reasons we don’t want the CCP to have control of TikTok.
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to infinitely extend hard-and-fast congressionally imposed deadlines that have survived court challenge.
Also see:
The Federalist: “Why The ‘#StopWillow’ Movement On TikTok May Be A CCP Influence Campaign”
StoptheCCP.org: “TikTok Only Pretends to Hide Data on U.S. Users From ByteDance and China”
Heritage.org: “TikTok Generation: A CCP Official in Every Pocket”
