The TikTok deal is agreed to.
Not closed. Not done. But the terms are now real enough to ruin some holiday plans feel for all the bankers, lawyers, and junior deal execs who will be living on cold coffee for the next month.
A special edition of Inside the Creator Economy to close out 2025. On a Friday no less!
Hello Friends! I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you are either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.
If the latter – and you want to subscribe, get it here!
TOP STORY
According to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, TikTok and ByteDance have signed binding agreements to move TikTok’s U.S. business into a new entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.
The headline structure, as reported so far:
- 50% goes to a new investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX (which leaves a mysterious additional 5%)
- 30.1% goes to “affiliates” of existing ByteDance investors
- 19.9% stays with ByteDance, keeping it under the 20% line that matters for the law
The deal is expected to close on January 22, 2026. The White House previously extended the enforcement pause to January 23, 2026, which is basically a polite way of saying “get this done now, and yes your holidays are ruined.”
Can you close something like this in about five weeks? It’s not impossible. I sold VidCon to Viacom and got the deal from LOI to signed in 10 days, mostly because Viacom’s deal team was about to roll straight into the CBS merger.
This is… slightly more complex.
Also, once the docs are signed and the shares shuffle, the real work starts. And I have more questions than answers.
15 QUESTIONS
So here are 15 Questions for TikTok USDS, Shou, Larry Ellison’s orbit, Silver Lake, MGX, and whoever else in Washington and Beijing still gets to say “no.”
- New app, new rules
A separate U.S. TikTok app has been rumored for months. When does it launch, what changes for normal users on day one, and how fast do the U.S. and global versions drift apart?
- A Local App in a Global World
As the U.S. and global apps diverge, how do brands plan and execute global campaigns without losing measurement, targeting, and sanity? Can a London team manage U.S. performance cleanly, and vice versa?
- One dashboard or complete chaos
Do creators get one unified metrics and payout interface, or do we split the world into “U.S. TikTok” and “everywhere else TikTok” like it’s 1999 and we’re arguing about region-locked DVDs? Is this an opportunity for VidIQ, TubeBuddy or ViewStats?
- Who owns the Algorithm?
This deal hinges on a “copy and retrain” of the recommendation system. Who controls the U.S. model weights, who audits them, and what does “Oracle oversight” mean day to day?
- A bottle in front of me, or a frontal lobotomy?
When the U.S. algorithm fork gets “retrained,” are we talking normal tuning or a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest lobotomy that trashes reach and rewires the feed?
- Clean room or back door
Everybody says “security” and “separation.” What is the actual technical and legal wall between ByteDance and the U.S. operation once the inevitable edge cases show up? And what stops Bytedance from sneaking back in?
- Moderation with receipts
Who sets content policy in the U.S. entity? Who runs enforcement? What changes in the appeals process, and how fast does it move when a creator’s business is on fire?
- Creator monetization reality
Does creator pay improve, worsen, or stay the same? And how does TikTok USDS win back creators who have quietly quit, moving most of their efforts to Shorts, Reels, and whoever else is paying on time?
- TikTok Shop, split brain edition
Shop has been a bright spot in the U.S. If commerce and ads stay tied to ByteDance-led operations while “security and ops” move to the JV, who owns the roadmap and who gets blamed when it breaks?
- Ellison family crossover episode
Oracle is central here. David Ellison runs Paramount. Is this just trivia, or does it turn into distribution, advertising, sports, and creator partnerships at scale?
- Slopocalypse Now
TikTok is already swimming in AI-generated sludge. With Rabble’s Vine-inspired reboot diVine promising an “AI-free” platform, and an AI backlash brewing, does a U.S.-controlled TikTok clamp down on synthetic spam, labeling, and repost farms, or does it keep the feed slop-happy and call it “creative efficiency”?
- Save the Children
With the U.S. getting more aggressive about kids and algorithms, what new guardrails show up in the U.S. app, and what changes actually make a difference, rather than just make good PR?
- Majority American, Trust Us
How exactly are you calculating “U.S.-owned” here, especially with Abu Dhabi’s MGX owning 15%. Who is in that extra 5%, and who, exactly, sits inside the 30.1% bucket of “existing investor affiliates”?
- Control and the Escape Hatch
What does the board actually look like (seats, votes, veto rights, reserved powers), and how do the U.S.-ownership holders sell or divest without breaking the “majority U.S.” requirement or freezing the cap table forever?
- Congressional Cojones?
Does this deal actually satisfy the spirit (and the letter) of the 2024 law, and if not, how fast does Congress come back with a sequel bill with sharper teeth?
And if I asked Ellison, Chew, Trump, and Xi Jinping whether they’re happy with the deal, would they say, “You ask a lot of questions for a beach-bum from Pacifica”?
Have a great holiday! I’ll see you with predictions, trends and signals in early January, along with some sort of answers – I hope – to at least some of these questions!
SPONSOR
LinkedIn’s new B2B Buyer Report makes the case better than I ever could: buyers trust expert voices more than brands, and they spend most of their research time reading the people who actually understand the space. That’s exactly my audience: marketers, media execs, founders, top creators and operators who shape budgets and make decisions.
A weekly sponsorship puts your company inside a trusted, high-intent environment, shows up repeatedly where it actually matters, and aligns your brand with the point-of-view content buyers say moves them. If you want to speak to the people building the next wave of media, creators, and AI, this is where they show up every week.
Drop me an email and check out our sponsorship information here.
Where’s Jim? Finishing up with off-site production of 1 Billion Followers Summit, catching a bit of holiday cheer and then off to Dubai!
Like this free newsletter? Buy me a coffee and say thanks! Or let’s do a meetup in your town.
100% written by me. AI used very sparingly for edits.
I’ve built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies – including an MCN to Discovery and VidCon to Paramount. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to get this newsletter every Monday.
Let me know what you think – email me at jim@louderback.com. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.
