The fresh investors are liable for a significant transaction fee.
The fresh investors are liable for a significant transaction fee.
In September, Donald Trump asserted that “the United States is receiving a tremendous fee” for facilitating the TikTok deal. Now sources inform the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that the fee is anticipated to fall around $10 billion. The funds are reportedly coming from new investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake. Reports indicate that $2.5 billion was already handed to the Treasury when the deal was finalized on January 22nd. The remaining sum will be disbursed in installments.
This represents the latest occurrence of the Trump administration interjecting itself into private enterprise in extraordinary ways, such as acquiring a 10-percent stake in Intel last August, a “golden share” in US Steel, and taking a 20-percent share of chip sales from Nvidia to China. In this case, the transaction also involves one of Trump’s staunchest backers and fundraisers, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO of Oracle.
If the reports hold true, the fee would account for over 70 percent of the deal’s total value, which saw a consortium of investors acquire a controlling interest in TikTok for $14 billion.
