ByteDance TikTok U.S. spin-out names MGX, Oracle, Silver Lake

On January 22, 2026, ByteDance announced a deal to spin out an American venture to operate TikTok in the United States, structured to comply with a 2024 federal law that aimed to separate TikTok from ByteDance over national-security concerns about ties to Beijing. Under the arrangement, non-Chinese investors will hold approximately 80 percent of the U.S. entity and ByteDance will retain 19.9 percent — the maximum allowed under the 2024 law. Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake will each hold a 15 percent stake, tied for the largest investor positions. Each takes a seat on the new venture's board: Kenneth Glueck (Oracle executive vice president), David Scott (MGX chief strategy and safety officer), and Egon Durban (Silver Lake co-chief executive). The new venture will license TikTok's recommendation algorithm from ByteDance and will have authority to moderate content; Oracle will oversee the security of Americans' data and monitor changes to the recommendation technology. Additional investors include Michael Dell's personal investment entity and a list of investment firms — General Atlantic and Susquehanna (both previously ByteDance investors), Alpha Wave Partners, Revolution, Virgo LI, NJJ Capital, and Merritt Way (affiliated with San Francisco-based Dragoneer). The deal closes a Trump-administration-negotiated arrangement that the WSJ first surfaced in September 2025 with MGX's selection as an approved operator. Corruption-relevant context the NYT highlights: Larry Ellison (Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, and CTO) has frequently visited the White House and Mar-a-Lago; his son David Ellison, who acquired Paramount in 2025, sat with President Trump at a UFC match and later spent $7.7 billion for UFC broadcast rights. MGX was founded in 2024 by Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund Mubadala and Emirati AI firm G42, and was previously named both as a co-investor in the Trump-announced $100 billion AI data-center initiative and as one party to a $2 billion MGX/Binance transaction that settled using Trump-family World Liberty Financial's USD1 stablecoin. Silver Lake has been an investor in G42 since 2021 and previously teamed with MGX on the 2025 acquisition of Altera; Silver Lake-affiliated Vantage Data Centers invested $15 billion in a Wisconsin Oracle/OpenAI data-center campus.