For those who came in late, the US voted to shut down TikTok in the US over fears that the Chinese government was using the social notworking site to spy on US teens and steal their cat pictures. Within a few days of tacking office Donald Trump reprieved TikTok to give him time to "do a deal." 

It seems that the plan is to tap software company Oracle and a group of outside investors, which includes Vole, to effectively take control of the app's global operations.

TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure.

"The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimise Chinese ownership."

Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux.

Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." This does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company.