TikTok US is now a joint venture: who owns it, who runs it, what’s left to watch

TikTok’s U.S. business now runs through a separate company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which TikTok announced on Jan 23, 2026. Nine months later, a new Politico Magazine report says the split is more complicated than the headline suggests. Here is the plain-English version of who owns the app your For You Page lives on.

The structure comes from a deal signed in December 2025, after a law passed by Congress required ByteDance to sell its U.S. business to Americans or face a ban.

Who owns what

TikTok’s own announcement names Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX as the three managing investors, with 15% each. ByteDance retains 19.9%. The rest is held by a longer list of investors, including the Dell Family Office and an affiliate of Susquehanna. ABC News, reporting on an internal memo from TikTok CEO Shou Chew in December, said affiliates of existing ByteDance investors hold 30.1%. The price was not disclosed.

Who runs it

The venture has a seven-member, majority-American board. TikTok’s announcement says Adam Presser is CEO and Will Farrell is chief security officer. The venture is responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance, and U.S. user data and the algorithm are secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud. The same safeguards cover CapCut and Lemon8.

The venture says it will retrain, test and update the recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data.

Where it stands now

On Oct 9, Politico Magazine reported, based on current and former employees who spoke anonymously and internal communications it reviewed, that the new company’s staff still work regularly with TikTok’s global organization. That includes coordinating on new features, sharing information about dangerous trends and collaborating on policies. U.S. employees also still use Lark, an internal chat system built by ByteDance.

TikTok has said that close coordination is part of the deal’s framework and that it has walled off Americans’ data in compliance with the law. In a statement to Politico, a White House spokesperson said TikTok is now “under the control of U.S. investors.” ByteDance did not respond to Politico’s request for comment.

The skeptics

On May 29, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey sent letters to Oracle and the venture. Reuters reported that he asked how they are protecting Americans’ personal data and preventing foreign entities from influencing which videos users see, and asked Oracle for the contractual terms of its review of ByteDance’s source code.

“how they are protecting against national security risks, including potential Chinese-driven algorithmic manipulation.”— Reuters, describing what Sen. Ed Markey asked of Oracle and TikTok USDS, May 29

TikTok USDS, Oracle and the White House did not immediately respond to Reuters at the time. Reuters also noted lawmakers had complained about a lack of details on the transaction but had yet to hold hearings.

What it means for creators

Politico puts TikTok’s U.S. audience at roughly 200 million people, and for them the app looks the same. The thing to watch is the algorithm: it is being retrained on U.S. data inside a new company, while the people running it still talk to the global team daily. Creators who depend on the For You Page will be the first to notice if distribution shifts.