President Donald Trump plans to issue an executive order this week granting TikTok an additional 90 days before enforcing a law that requires its parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the US version of the app, a White House spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.
This marks the company’s third extension.
TikTok missed its original January 19 deadline to sever ties with its Chinese owner and briefly went offline in the US before returning after Trump assured that enforcement would not be immediate. The president later gave the company until April 5 to find a new buyer, and subsequently extended the deadline to June 19.
Now, Trump is expected to push the deadline further, into mid-September.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
These repeated extensions go beyond what the original law stipulated—allowing only a one-time, 90-day delay before the initial January 19 deadline.
In the last five months, a wave of bidders has surfaced for TikTok’s US operations, including Perplexity AI, AppLovin, and reportedly Amazon, according to the New York Times. Another possible outcome is a sale to a consortium of current investors, which would let ByteDance retain a minority stake. Trump has appointed Vice President JD Vance to lead the negotiation process.
The campaign to force TikTok’s sale began in 2020, when Trump signed an executive order aiming to remove it from app stores. That order was blocked by a federal judge, but concerns among state and federal lawmakers persisted about the app’s potential use as a propaganda or data-collection tool by the Chinese Communist Party.
On April 24, 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, mandating ByteDance to divest within 270 days. Months later, Trump began expressing support for TikTok, promising during campaign stops to prevent a ban—departing from his earlier position in 2020.
In a May interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker, Trump said he had a “warm spot in his heart” for TikTok.
TikTok and ByteDance have not yet responded to requests for comment.
