TikTok lives to fight another day.
President Donald Trump is set to issue an executive order this week giving the company 90 more days before he enforces a law requiring its owner, ByteDance, to divest from its US app, a White House spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.
It’s the company’s third extension.
TikTok missed its original January 19 deadline to separate from its Chinese owner, and briefly went dark in the US before coming back online after Trump’s assurances that he wouldn’t immediately enforce the law. The president issued an executive order giving the company until April 5 to find a new owner, and later extended that timeline to June 19.
Now, he’s set to offer TikTok until mid-September to bargain.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
All of these postponements fall outside the guidelines of the original law, which dictated that the president could grant a one-time, 90-day extension before the original January 19 deadline.
Over the past five months, a wave of bidders has emerged for TikTok’s US business, including Perplexity AI, AppLovin, and, according to the New York Times, Amazon. TikTok could also sell to a consortium of existing investors, which would allow ByteDance to maintain a minority stake. Trump tasked his vice president, JD Vance, to oversee deal negotiations.
The push to sell TikTok and other apps owned by ByteDance kicked off in 2020, when Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban the company from app stores. While that effort was blocked by a federal judge, other state and federal politicians later raised concerns that TikTok could be used as a propaganda tool or data collection platform for the Chinese Communist Party.
On April 24, 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law, giving ByteDance 270 days to separate from its US app. A few months later, Trump began to warm up to TikTok, pledging on the campaign trail that he would try to rescue it from a ban (a change from his 2020 position).
In May, Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that he had a “warm spot in his heart” for TikTok.
TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
