In September, Donald Trump claimed that “the United States is getting a tremendous fee” for brokering the TikTok deal. Now the sources tell wall street journal and this new York Times The fee is expected to be in the range of $10 billion. The money is believed to be paid for by new investors including Oracle and Silver Lake. There are reports that $2.5 billion had already been paid to the treasury when the deal closed on January 22. The remaining payment will be made in installments.
It’s the latest example of the Trump administration involving itself in private business in an unprecedented way, including taking a 10 percent stake in Intel last August, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and a 20 percent cut in chip sales from Nvidia to China. In this example, the deal also includes one of Trump’s biggest supporters and fundraisers, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison.
If the reporting is accurate, the fee would represent more than 70 percent of the value of the deal, in which a group of investors took a majority stake in TikTok for $14 billion.
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