Congress banned TikTok last year on national security grounds, saying China could get access to American users’ data. The app was about to be shut down until Trump personally ordered a deal to shift control from Chinese parent ByteDance to a new US-run company.
Now Trump insists the government must be paid for arranging the takeover. “It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” he said in the Oval Office. A day earlier he bragged, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal.”
The investors include Silver Lake and Oracle, who would control around half the new TikTok entity. Existing US investors would hold about 30 per cent, while ByteDance’s stake would fall to under 20 per cent to satisfy the law. On top of putting up billions, the consortium will pay a multibillion-dollar fee straight to Washington for the privilege of being forced into the deal.
The sums involved are unprecedented. Bankers advising on similar deals usually take less than a per cent, and on transactions worth tens of billions that means far less than the numbers Trump is demanding. Some lawyers say charging companies for regulatory approval may not even be legal.
Earlier in his term Trump grabbed 15 per cent of Nvidia’s chip sales to China in exchange for export licences and pocketed a golden share in Nippon Steel’s takeover of US Steel that gives him power over the board. What used to be government oversight has turned into government rent-seeking, with Trump taking his cut as if the Treasury were a silent partner.
In 2020, when he first tried to engineer a TikTok sale, Trump compared it to “key money” a tenant pays a landlord just for access to a lease. This time he has gone further, ordering the sale and then billing the buyers.
Some Republicans are starting to twitch at the spectacle of the federal government acting like a fixer skimming cash off the top. The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street, however, look more interested in whether they can get in on the action than in questioning the principle.