Washington DC - President Donald Trump's administration will receive a $10 billion fee from investors into TikTok as part of a deal to establish a US-controlled joint venture and avert a ban of the social media app.

The payment first reported by the Wall Street Journal comes as a result of a deal struck in January that allows US investors friendly to the Trump administration to take control of TikTok in the US.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC was officially established when Oracle, Silver Lake, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and a collection of other backers closed the deal and paid out an initial $2.5 billion fee to the Treasury Department.

In total, the US government will receive $10 billion from the app's investors over a series of payments meant as an effective reward for brokering the deal itself.

Trump was forthright about the payments when he announced a framework deal for TikTok in September, saying that the US "is getting a tremendous fee plus... just for making the deal, and I don’t want to throw that out the window."

TikTok's new backers have agreed to secure US user data and introduce stricter data privacy and cybersecurity measures

The deal will see the app's Chinese owner, ByteDance, lose a great deal of its control over TikTok's US operations as well as its access to the data collected from its 200 million American users.

Legislation passed under the Biden administration threatened to ban TikTok's US operations if it didn't transfer into American ownership and introduce measures to better protect the data of its users.

In January 2025, the app briefly shut down ahead of an impending ban but quickly reopened after receiving assurances from the then-incoming Trump administration.