Sources: Trump is expected to make a decision in the next 24-36 hours on a TikTok deal; Walmart is expected to partner with Oracle, which will take a 20% stake
- President Donald Trump is expected to make a decision on TikTok's fate in the U.S. in the next 24-36 hours, sources told CNBC's David Faber.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes out a week of fast-moving restructuring: ByteDance had already floated placing TikTok's global business in a standalone US-based company with minority American shareholders, and Oracle and Walmart kept pursuing a stake even as ByteDance bet Trump would drop his demand for a full sale rather than force a ban. Now the structure has settled — Oracle at roughly 20%, Walmart alongside it — and everything funnels into one decision point: Trump's call within 24-36 hours.
What makes that single decision consequential is who is attached to it: an enterprise software company gaining its highest-profile consumer platform, and the largest US retailer buying a direct social-commerce on-ramp.
First-order effects
- Oracle converts its sudden role as TikTok's security savior into a roughly 20% ownership position plus a marquee cloud relationship, while Walmart gets equity in the short-video platform its retail rival Amazon never secured.
- TikTok's 100 million-plus US users and ByteDance's ad business hang entirely on Trump's verdict — approve and the ban threat lifts; reject and the divest-or-ban deadline resumes its force.
Second-order effects
- Approval unlocks ByteDance's next move — a planned US IPO for the new global TikTok business — turning a forced restructuring into a public-market listing with American minority shareholders inside the cap table.
- Walmart's partnership forces retail and social-platform rivals to treat short-video commerce as contested ground, since the biggest US retailer now owns a seat at TikTok's table rather than building a competitor.
Third-order effects
- The structure itself becomes the durable answer: rather than a clean divestiture, US pressure resolves into minority-stake joint arrangements with ByteDance retaining operational ties — a template that resurfaces years later when the same less-than-20% ByteDance joint-venture design reappears in 2025 negotiations.
- If one executive's sign-off remains the gate for foreign-owned apps, deal structures will keep optimizing for political acceptability over market logic, making regulatory relationships a core asset class for companies like Oracle.
The trend: TikTok's US fate keeps resolving into the same shape — ByteDance cedes a minority stake and governance cover to US corporate partners while keeping the app running — with each round gated by a presidential decision rather than a market outcome.