- President-elect Trump said he’ll sign an executive order on Monday delaying the TikTok ban.
- The hugely popular social media app went dark on Saturday just before a federal ban took effect.
- Trump once sought to ban TikTok in the US. But over the past year, he has embraced the app.
President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said he plans to issue an executive order after his inauguration on Monday to delay enforcement of the TikTok ban.
Trump, who’s just a day away from being sworn into office for his second term, made the statement on his Truth Social platform hours after the hugely popular social media app went dark.
The president-elect said his executive order would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and added that “there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark” prior to the order.
Trump didn’t specify the length of time he’d give ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to find a non-Chinese buyer, but he said he’d like the United States to “have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture.”
“Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok,” the president-elect wrote. “With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars – maybe trillions.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump meant the US government or just a US entity.
Trump during his first term unsuccessfully sought to ban TikTok in the United States, but has since shied away from that position. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he said young people would “go crazy without it.” Trump himself joined TikTok in advance of the 2024 race.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a Trump ally, said on X on Sunday that he’s long been opposed to a TikTok ban, arguing that it infringed on “freedom of speech.”
“That said, the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced. Something needs to change,” Musk wrote.
This is a developing story.
