In September, Donald Trump claimed that “the United States is getting a tremendous fee” for brokering the TikTok deal. Now sources tell the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that fee is expected to be in the range of $10 billion. The money is supposedly being paid by new investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake. Reports are that $2.5 billion was already paid to the Treasury when the deal closed on January 22nd. The rest will be paid out in installments.
This is the latest example of the Trump administration inserting itself into private business in unprecedented ways, including taking on a 10-percent stake in Intel last August, a “golden share” in US Steel, and a 20-percent cut in chip sales from Nvidia to China. In this instance, the deal also involves one of Trump’s biggest supporters and fundraisers, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO of Oracle.
If the reporting is accurate, the fee would represent over 70 percent of the deal’s value, which saw a group of investors take a majority stake in TikTok for $14 billion.