• by Colin Kirkland , March 31, 2025

Over the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump told Reuters that the White House will strike a deal with ByteDance by Saturday to sell TikTok, the short-form video app used by over 170 million Americans.

“We have a lot of potential buyers,” Trump told Reuters on Sunday. “There's tremendous interest in TikTok.”

Trump added that he’d “like to see TikTok remain alive.”

Despite lawmakers urging the president to extend the sell-off deadline by an additional six months, continuing to keep TikTok on the app store until October 16, Trump continues to issue statements about completing the deal by April 5.

However, as the deadline looms, the public has received little information about the logistics of a potential deal, including which company is most likely to prevail, whether ByteDance will support new ownership in the region, and how it will impact American users' in-app experience and data privacy.

Blackstone -- the private equity firm -- is the most recent contender to join the pool of potential buyers.

On Friday, Reuters reported that the company was considering making a small minority investment in TikTok's U.S. operations, joining ByteDance's non-Chinese shareholders. This would be led by Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic.

It is possible that Blackstone has surpassed Oracle as the most promising candidate for a selloff, especially since Oracle's proposed deal violated key security concerns posed in the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which demands that foreign-owned entities do not own more than 20% of the app, do not possess direction or control over the platform, and do not have an “operational relationship” with regard to its content recommendation algorithms or data sharing.

Perplexity AI -- a free AI-powered search engine -- has also outlined a plan to rebuild TikTok in the U.S., including its algorithm, revising its initial takeover offer for the app that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of “NewCo,” the new company Perplexity proposed upon a future IPO.

Trump's extension of the deadline has been deemed unlawful by U.S. senators who have argued that Congress is the appropriate body to revise the deadline set out in the recently passed bill.

“The path to saving TikTok should run through Capitol Hill,” they say.

Trump says he will consider giving China “a little reduction in tariffs or something” to finalize a deal by the proposed deadline.