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For Donald Trump and the Murdochs, the plan to secure US control of TikTok is a win-win – a social media mouthpiece ahead of the midterms, and for a bargain price. By Michael Winkler.
Trump’s plan for a Murdoch TikTok
In a forced sale that has been called “one of the most contentious tech transactions of the decade”, the Trump administration is following through on the president’s executive order to transfer the American operations of TikTok to domestic control.
The video-based social media platform, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has 1.59 billion monthly users worldwide. This phenomenal market penetration raised concerns about personal data misuse, Chinese influence and national security implications. In 2023, the TikTok app was banned from all Australian government-owned phones, bringing this country’s public service into line with Five Eyes partners Britain, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
In the final year of the Biden administration, congress passed legislation in April 2024 that required ByteDance to sell control of its US operations or face a complete ban.
President Donald Trump – who has publicly declared himself a fan of TikTok, aligning himself with its 170 million American users – saw greater opportunity in a sale, and shared his vision for a takeover consortium last month. While ByteDance would retain a fifth of the operation, the lion’s share would go to a grouping of US billionaires, including Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, and Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies. Also in the mix were Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch.
“I hate to tell you this – a man named Lachlan is involved,” Trump told reporters. “You know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people.”
This is not the first Murdoch foray into social media. News Corp paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005 but sold it six years later for $35 million. Rupert Murdoch said his company managed to “mismanage it in every possible way”.
“TikTok is bigger than MySpace ever was by several orders of magnitude,” says Denis Muller, senior research fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, Melbourne University. “It will be controlled by a consortium of enormously wealthy men who are in Trump’s pocket and ideologically aligned with the Murdochs.
“The key link to Trump is through Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle,” says Muller, adding that Forbes magazine has estimated Trump owns between US$32,000 and $130,000 worth of Oracle shares.
“That combination gives Trump very strong leverage over the consortium that is taking over TikTok US.”
Another rumoured investor is MGX, an AI-focused investment firm backed by the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned investment fund. There is a personal financial connection between MGX and Trump, with the firm’s $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance using the stablecoin created by Trump’s World Liberty Financial.
“Not only is it a gross conflict of interest on Trump’s part, but it gives him a vast online platform which will have little choice but to conform to whatever he wants it to do or say,” says Muller.
“We can expect that the TikTok algorithm in the US, which will be controlled by the US consortium, will be adjusted to ensure it is as favourable as possible for Trump.
“The big question is what exactly are the US regulators doing about that key link between Trump and Ellison/Oracle? It looks utterly corrupt, and given TikTok’s market dominance there must surely be anti-trust issues,” Muller says.
This is a collision of geopolitics, economics, media and technology. It is easy to spot the winners in the forced sale of an asset many believe has been wildly undervalued, but the biggest loser might be public probity. It remains to be seen how Beijing will respond to Trump’s display of economic coercion in purported service of national security.
There is a deadline of December 16 for the deal to be completed. Specifics of algorithm control, licensing and data flow remain under negotiation. The involvement of the Murdoch family raises questions about how content might be moderated, curated or prioritised. TikTok’s content distribution – what’s recommended, what’s visible and what’s hidden – could shift in ways that favour certain political ideologies or identities if it follows the path of other Murdoch media outlets.
Trump tried to pre-empt predictable concerns about bias. “If I could, I’d make it 100 per cent MAGA-related,” Trump said. “But it’s not going to work out that way. Unfortunately, no, everyone’s going to be treated fairly. Every group, every philosophy, every policy, will be treated very fairly.”
New York-based David Folkenflik, media correspondent for NPR, says Trump’s billionaire allies paid an undisclosed amount in order to be part of the consortium. “The fact Trump has essentially required a multibillion-dollar payment from members of the consortium, requiring them to spend money to invest, would seem to fit the definition of crony capitalism,” Folkenflik says.
“The idea that a president is directing private transactions for political and personal reasons seems to be a corruption of how we think free enterprise and free markets are supposed to work.”
Even in a chaotic year for US politics and business, it has surprised some observers that Trump is lauding the Murdochs’ involvement. In mid July, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, after it reported that the president wrote a “bawdy” birthday note to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Less than 10 weeks later, Trump was enthusing about Murdoch membership of the US TikTok consortium.
Folkenflik is unsurprised by the Murdoch involvement. “It takes extraordinary levels of compartmentalisation to disassociate yourself from the president suing you for $10 billion, but both Murdoch and Trump are incredibly transactional in how they look at things. It’s a squabble on the sideline. You could easily see a world where Trump could let this lawsuit collapse on itself. He tends to lose suits that go forward, and relies on people settling.”
The Murdochs’ involvement in the takeover also raises broader questions of media consolidation, given that Fox is already a powerful voice across traditional media platforms. Part-ownership of US TikTok would significantly enhance its reach, augmenting television and print outlets with a social media platform that has strong reach into younger demographics.
Pew Research Center has found that news consumption on TikTok has increased sharply in recent years. Fifty-five per cent of TikTok users say they regularly get news on the platform, up from 22 per cent in 2020. Trump’s personal account has 15 million followers.
Many other questions are yet to be answered. How will algorithm control be structured? Will ByteDance retain any influence via licensing? Will oversight mechanisms be transparent and reliable? Will US TikTok user numbers increase, with more consumers feeling confident about the security of their data, or will young people leave it behind for a different digital hangout?
As it is shaping up, the forced sale is not only “one of the most contentious tech transactions of the decade”, says Akhmad Hanan – it is a clear victory on a number of fronts for Trump.
“Domestically, it allows Trump to appear tough on China while avoiding the backlash of cutting off an app beloved by more than 170 million Americans,” the researcher wrote in an article for the Lowy Institute.
“The move also bolsters his campaign narrative ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, presenting him as the only leader capable of reining in Chinese tech power. At the same time, critics argue the White House has set a dangerous precedent by politicising corporate ownership.”
That precedent is, however, nothing new for Rupert Murdoch. Just as his power appeared to be waning, a social media deal could yet again assert it. In a media-political landscape where nothing seems too far-fetched, the nonagenarian mogul is set to have a foothold on a platform even he could never have imagined at the turn of the century.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 3, 2025 as "TikTok stitch-up".
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