James Kynge

I have a bit of an addictive personality, it turns out.

I'm finding out rather late in life.

I just scroll, doom scroll through TikTok the whole time.

There's all kinds of things, food, animals, pets, all kinds of stuff that I'm looking at.

So back to the key issue.

So the question to me is,

has ByteDance's control over TikTok been reduced or severed?

And I would say it's been reduced.

In fact, I would go a little bit further than that.

I would say that this deal effectively means that the ownership of the car

that is TikTok in the US has been given to a US company, this joint venture that we'll get into in a minute.

But the engine of that car remains in the hands of a Chinese company called ByteDance.

When I say the engine, of course, I'm talking about the algorithm.

So just a few bare bones of the deal.

So ByteDance transferred the majority of its U.S.

operations to a new entity.

That entity is called TikTokUSDS, Joint Venture LLC.

And that company, the joint venture, is led by Oracle, Silverlake, MGX.

All of those are American companies.

they hold over 80% of the ownership of the equity in that joint venture.