After years of bipartisan attacks on TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, which for a time included an effort to potentially ban the social media app in the U.S., a new U.S. TikTok spinoff has been announced, set to be owned and overseen by a tight-knit consortium of tech and financial megabillionaires, many of whom have had direct business relationships with Trump and members of his administration and family.

The deal puts Trump-aligned tech barons — Oracle’s Larry Ellison, X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — in firm control of virtually all major U.S. social media platforms.

In addition to its ominous bodings for media freedom in the U.S. — one-fifth of Americans get their news from TikTok — the deal comes as many TikTok users are already alleging censorship of content ranging from criticisms of federal immigration agents’ killing of Alex Pretti to rebuttals of the Department of Homeland Security’s rationales for entering homes without judicial warrants.

Moreover, many of the key owners of the new U.S. TikTok spinoff have professed and demonstrated commitments to Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu and have donated prolifically to pro-Israel groups — a fact worth noting since U.S. politicians have openly criticized TikTok for exposing users to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in addition to the prime rationale behind the attacks on TikTok tied to inter-imperial rivalry with China.

TikTok’s New Algorithm Oligarch

A coterie of U.S. megabillionaires — including three of the world’s very wealthiest oligarchs, whose combined wealth is inching toward a half-trillion dollars — sit atop the new TikTok spinoff.

First among them is Larry Ellision, the Trump-tied tech mogul whose conglomerate, Oracle, has a 15 percent stake in U.S. TikTok and a seat on its seven-member board.

Most critically, Ellison and Oracle will oversee U.S. TikTok’s algorithms and data management. The New York Times put it bluntly: “The new venture will moderate content in TikTok’s feed, deciding which posts to leave up and which to take down.”

No person will have more power “deciding which posts to leave up and which to take down” than Ellison.

Ellison is a close ally of Donald Trump and has significant influence with the president. As Truthout previously noted, he has personally hosted Trump fundraisers and was called a “shadow president of the United States” by one Trump adviser.

Ellison helped Trump claim a win early in his second term by partnering with OpenAI and SoftBank to invest $100 billion in the Stargate AI infrastructure project, which Trump announced with great fanfare immediately after his inauguration, calling it a venture that will “[build] the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI” as his administration seeks “AI dominance.” Oracle’s billionaire former CEO and current board member, Safra Catz, donated over $130,000 to Trump in 202.

Ellison is already a media baron, having recently acquired Paramount Global, overseen by his son, David Ellison. The father-son duo immediately signaled the company’s rightward, Trump-aligned turn by hiring Bari Weiss to run CBS News, whose new rollout has faced intense ridicule for its ineptitude and fawning attitude toward the Trump administration.

Ellison is currently worth around $223 billion. He owns luxurious properties across the world, including virtually an entire Hawaiian island, and a collection of superyachts, private jets, and invaluable art works. While Oracle began as a database software company whose first customer was the CIA, it’s boomed into a massive conglomerate with major business in cloud services and AI.

Now firmly at the helm of TikTok’s algorithms, Ellison’s sway over the news and entertainment content of tens of millions of people is only set to expand.

Trump-Tied Megabillionaire Owners

Another pro-Trump megabillionaire, Jeff Yass, worth around $65 billion, is set to profit big from the new U.S. TikTok.

Yass is the cofounder and CEO of Susquehanna International Group, an investment firm with a 15 percent stake in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Yass has a 7 percent personal stake in ByteDance worth $21 billion.

In 2024, Yass reportedly played a direct and pivotal role in reversing Trump’s previous support for a U.S. ban of TikTok. Yass started donating to Trump after his November 2024 reelection, having since given millions of dollars to Trump’s White House ballroom, presidential transition and the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Indeed, Yass is one the most prolific donors in U.S. politics. Like Ellison, he supports a pro-corporate, right-wing agenda, with his prime issue being school privatization and so-called education reform, which he’s splurged tens of millions on nationally.

Given Yass’s preexisting stake in ByteDance, it appears that he’ll be profiting from the new U.S. TikTok from two sides: first, through Susquehanna’s subsidiary, Vastmere Strategic Investments, which is part of the new U.S. TikTok consortium; and second, through ByteDance, which will have a 19.9 percent stake in U.S. TikTok.

Another tech mogul joining the ownership consortium of U.S. TikTok is Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies.

Dell is among the world’s richest people, worth around $133 billion. His wealth skyrocketed over the past decade through a series of business deals. His investment firm, the Dell Family Office, is part of the new TikTok consortium, and his close business ally, the private equity firm Silver Lake, has a 15 percent stake in U.S. TikTok, with its co-CEO Egon Durban sitting on its new seven-member board.

Like Ellison and Yass, Dell has enamored himself to Trump — in his case, by donating $6.25 billion last December into “Trump accounts,” investment accounts for U.S. children created by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, which critics accuse of being new tax shelters for the wealthy and potential rationales for stripping away social safety protections.

Web of Trump Family Deal Makers

Many of the remaining U.S. TikTok investors are tied to Trump and to each other through a knotty web of alliances, further suggesting that the new TikTok spinoff will be run by a tight-knit clique.

MGX, an Emirati investment firm focused on tech and AI, will have a 15 percent stake in U.S. TikTok and a seat on its board. MGX has been involved in business deals tied to the Trump family. For example, it used a stablecoin backed by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, in a $2 billion deal with Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. It also has partnerships with a range of powerhouse U.S. companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, BlackRock, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI. MGX, like Dell Technologies, also has close interlocks with Silver Lake, a private equity firm overseeing $116 billion in assets.

The ties between MGX, Silver Lake, and other U.S. TikTok consortium members are manifold. For example, Silver Lake’s Durban serves on the board of G42, a “foundational partner” of MGX, and Silver Lake and MGX have partnered on major business deals. Silver Lake’s Durban currently sits on the board of Dell Technologies. A Silver Lake-owned data center firm has partnered with Ellison’s Oracle.

U.S. TikTok’s new owners also have long histories of partnering with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family.

In 2025, Durban and Silver Lake made the largest-ever private equity buyout — of video games corporation Electronic Arts for $55 billion — in partnership with Jared Kushner. (Silver Lake also owns the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship [UFC] and World Wrestling Entertainment [WWE] — favorites of Donald Trump).

Another U.S. TikTok backer, Yuri Milner, invested $850,000 in 2015 in a real estate startup established by Kushner.

Private equity giant TPG Global, overseeing $286 billion in assets, is also represented on U.S. TikTok’s seven-person board. TPG’s billionaire CEO Jon Winkelried previously served as a strategic adviser and partner at Thrive Capital, a venture firm run by billionaire Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother.

Additionally, Vice President JD Vance was previously a partner at another U.S. TikTok consortium member, the venture firm Revolution.

Pro-Israel Ties

The driving political rationale around the TikTok deal has revolved around U.S. imperial rivalry with China, but a key factor has also involved claims — repeated by U.S. politicians from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Rep. Josh Gottheimer, to Marco Rubio and Sen. Josh Hawley — that TikTok was responsible for fomenting protest against Israel by showing viewers content of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly acknowledged this in 2025 when he called negotiations over TikTok “the most important purchase going on right now” and stated that “we have to use the tools of battle” and that “the most important ones” today were “on social media.” Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt claimed in late 2023 that “we really have a TikTok problem, the Gen-Z problem.”

That “TikTok problem” could now be addressed: Core owners of the new U.S. spinoff are starkly aligned with the Israeli regime.

Ellison, who will have more power than anyone over U.S. TikTok’s algorithms, is extremely close with Netanyahu, who has vacationed on Ellison’s Hawaiian island, and who Ellison has supported during his corruption trials.

Ellison has spoken of his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and said Oracle will “do everything we can to support the country of Israel.” Israeli-born former Oracle CEO Safra Catz worked to create pro-Israel TV shows to influence U.S. public opinion.

Ellison is also a massive donor to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a U.S. nonprofit that effectively subsidizes the Israeli military. Ellison’s reported donations to the FIDF include $10 million in 2014 and $16.6 million in 2017.

Michael Dell also gave $1.8 million to the FIDF in 2014, and in 2024 he gave $250,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition, an Israeli-tied group that has targeted pro-Palestine activists and supported Canary Mission, which “outs” pro-Palestine organizers and whose database has reportedly been used by the Trump administration to flag activists for potential deportation. Dell has also had a decades-long business relationship with Israel and its military.

Another investor in the U.S. TikTok consortium, Yuri Milner, is also an FIDF donor; and Yass has donated to pro-Israel groups and is a benefactor of “a conservative Israeli think tank at the helm of the country’s rightward lurch,” according to The Intercept.

Surveillance and Propaganda

The new reality for TikTok users in the U.S. could not be starker: Their feeds will now be overseen and shaped by a clique of billionaire oligarchs firmly committed to a Trump-aligned agenda.

Worries that Ellison will bend the U.S. TikTok’s algorithms to align with MAGA’s political agenda are compounded by his excitement about tech surveillance. In 2024, speaking about AI, Ellison shockingly said out loud that “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

The agenda and alliances of the billionaire clique ruling over the U.S. TikTok spinoff are causing fears of a potential dual threat from the new app. First among them is the concern that its algorithms, now under the purview of Ellison, will be altered to support the Trump administration and Ellison’s own agenda to limit or censor content.

“My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda,” Georgetown University professor Anupam Chander told The New York Times.

Second, and perhaps more ominously, there’s growing alarm over the app’s collection of personal data, which precedes the new spinoff deal. App disclosures, which are required by state privacy laws, have said TikTok can gather data such as location data and data on “sexual life or sexual orientation,” “status as transgender or nonbinary,” and “citizenship or immigration status,” leading to fears that such data could be weaponized to operate as a veritable arm of the Trump regime’s apparatus of detention, deportation and repression, now that the app will be overseen by close Trump allies who are on record as openly praising tech surveillance.

“I worry about all online services collaborating with the administration, and when one is friendly, you have greater concerns,” David Greene, senior counsel for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, told Truthout. “Given the political affiliations of the new owners and the current administration’s data practices itself in terms of sharing — what we’ve seen with ICE enforcement, seeking information from all available sources, even if there are supposed to be legal barriers protecting it, to identify base targets — we don’t see a lot of respect for data privacy administration or those who work with it.”