A wealthy entrepreneur based in a western US state will be making an offer to buy TikTok for around $50 billion on Wednesday, The Post can reveal.
Larry Ellison, 80, had been floated as a potential buyer earlier this year for the social media app, which is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, and his company Oracle already serves as a cloud computing partner for TikTok.
President Trump had pledged to “save TikTok” before taking office and signed an executive order on Day One granting a 75-day reprieve from a law signed by former President Joe Biden that mandated the qualified divestment of the app from its Chinese parent company.
“I met with the owners of Tiktok, the big owners, it’s worthless if it doesn’t get a permit,” he told reporters at the White House in January during a $500 billion AI infrastructure project announcement involving Oracle, Softbank and OpenAI.
“It’s worth like a trillion dollars,” the president added. “So what I’m thinking about saying to somebody is, ‘buy it and give half to the United States of America, and we’ll give you the permit, and they’ll have a great partner.”
At the time, Trump said he was open to Ellison purchasing TikTok.
