Trump Says the Murdochs May Join TikTok Investors
President Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, could be among the investors involved in a deal to bring the popular video app TikTok under U.S. ownership.
“A man named Lachlan is involved,” he said in a recorded interview on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” He and Rupert Murdoch are “probably going to be in the group, I think they’re going to be in the group.”
The potential investment would be made by the Fox Corporation, the conservative media behemoth that operates Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, according to a person with knowledge of the talks.
The interest comes as ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, races to line up investors for a deal that would separate the app’s U.S. business from that of its Chinese parent. That move is required under a federal law passed last year amid national security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China. President Trump has delayed the enforcement of that law four times, most recently last week.
Related Knowledge Center: The TikTok ban
The U.S. Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law a measure banning TikTok if it weren’t sold by its Chinese ownership. But now-President Donald Trump gave the service a reprieve, and a sale of its U.S. operations appears imminent.