Sources familiar with President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration told USA Today that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to attend the swearing-in on Monday.
The wildly popular app, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, faces a Jan. 19 deadline to either wind down its U.S. operations or find a U.S. buyer. While the U.S. Supreme Court is mulling over the constitutionality of the law banning the app, the justices appeared skeptical of TikTok’s chances at a hearing on the matter last week.
Though Trump once championed the ban, citing fears the Chinese government could force ByteDance to turn over its users’ sensitive data, he’s since had a turn of heart.
Lawyers for the president-elect last month asked the Supreme Court to delay the ban so his administration could pursue a “political resolution.” On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Trump was considering an executive order suspending enforcement of the ban for up to 90 days.
Outgoing President Joe Biden is reportedly also considering how to keep TikTok alive if the bipartisan legislation he signed in April goes into effect on Sunday.
About a third of American adults use TikTok, including nearly 60% of people ages 18 to 29, according to a recent Pew Research survey.
Earlier this week, TikTok rejected as “pure fiction” a rumor that the Chinese government was considering a proposal to sell the company’s U.S. operations to Trump’s billionaire benefactor Elon Musk.
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Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and quickly set about changing the algorithm to promote conservative-leaning users and his own account, a 2024 study found. The company is now worth less than a quarter of its original price, according to Fidelity, which helped Musk take the company private.