What the heck is going on with TikTok and Oracle, explained

The fate of TikTok, the wildly popular video-sharing app, has involved plenty of plot twists since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late August that promised to effectively ban TikTok from doing business in the US over national security concerns — unless the Chinese-owned app sold its US operations to an American company by September 20. But wait — Oracle isn’t actually going to buy TikTok. Instead, it’s offered to buy the rights to take over TikTok’s US data operations (which Microsoft also originally wanted to do, but Trump discouraged — more on that later), further complicating the situation.The proposed deal between Oracle and ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, involves a number of extraordinarily political, volatile, and complex factors. Although it’s unknown so far if Trump will approve this deal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said about the deal on CNBC Monday morning, “We have a lot of confidence in both Microsoft and Oracle; they [ByteDance] have chosen Oracle.”All this has unfolded as CFIUS, a US national security regulatory agency, is conducting an ongoing review into TikTok — a process that Trump seemingly bypassed to issue his executive orders about the app. So from ByteDance’s perspective, a partial sale to Oracle that doesn’t include the prized algorithm could be a win-win situation for both the US and the Chinese government.But then what was the point of the executive order forcing a sale, even if Trump had no intention of actually enforcing it and even if these national security concerns weren’t serious enough to warrant a full-on sale of TikTok US in the first place.Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison and CEO Safra Catz are rare supporters of Trump among mostly liberal Silicon Valley tech executives (Facebook board member Peter Thiel is another notable exception).