The Trump Administration is set to receive a $10B fee from investors for brokering the TikTok deal, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. As a reminder, investors were able to steal scoop up TikTok's U.S. operations at a remarkable $14B valuation, which means the “broker fee” represents a more than 70% commission on top of the total deal value.
Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX have already paid the Treasury Department roughly $2.5B when the deal closed in January and will make the remaining payments in installments, according to people familiar with the matter.
President Trump alluded to the commission when announcing the framework for the deal last year:
“The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window.”
So while the fee itself comes as no surprise, the size of it certainly does. The $10B payment is unprecedented for a government's role in arranging a transaction, or for a private transaction for that matter. For comparison, The Wall Street Journal reports that Bank of America is in line to make around $130M for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5B sale to Union Pacific, which is one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal, yet still represents less than a single percentage point fee, which is typical for private deals.
70% feels more like a shakedown than a commission. Frankly, the whole deal stinks.
For one thing, TikTok U.S. isn't worth $14B. It's worth a heck of a lot more. The deal valued TikTok's U.S. operations at roughly 1.3x its annual revenue. In comparison, Meta is valued at 11.4x its annual turnover. If TikTok had been awarded the same valuation-to-revenue multiple, which it should have been, given that it's the most influential social network in the world right now, then the U.S. entity would have been valued at roughly $125B.
Secondly, why were the other bids rejected? Frank McCourt's Project Liberty consortium submitted a $20B bid as far back as January 2025, MrBeast's group said it had secured more than $30B, and Reid Rasner offered close to $50B. Yet somehow, in a free market, a $14B bid won the deal? Is it safe to assume the $10B commission influenced that decision?
Am I the only one who thinks there's something off about this whole TikTok deal and the accompanying $10B fee? Hit reply and let me know.