New investors are facing a significant transaction fee. In September, Donald Trump asserted that the US would receive a “tremendous fee” for facilitating the TikTok deal. Sources now indicate to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that this fee is anticipated to be around $10 billion, with payments from new investors such as Oracle and Silver Lake. Reports mention that $2.5 billion was already paid to the Treasury when the deal closed on January 22nd, with the remainder to be paid in installments.
This instance exemplifies the Trump administration’s unprecedented involvement in private business, including acquiring a 10-percent stake in Intel last August, a “golden share” in US Steel, and securing a 20-percent cut in Nvidia’s chip sales to China. This particular deal involves one of Trump’s prominent supporters and fundraisers, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO of Oracle.
If accurate, the fee accounts for over 70 percent of the deal’s $14 billion value, wherein a group of investors took a majority stake in TikTok.