WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order directing the US to take steps to start developing a government-owned investment fund that he said could be used to profit off of TikTok if he’s successful at finding it an American buyer.
Trump signed an order on his first day office to grant the Chinese-owned TikTok until early April to find a domestic partner or buyer, but he’s said he’s looking for the US to take a 50 percent stake in the massive social media platform. He said Monday in the Oval Office that TikTok was an example of what he could put in a new US sovereign wealth fund.
“We might put that in the sovereign wealth fund, whatever we make or we do a partnership with very wealthy people, a lot of options,” he said of TikTok. “But we could put that as an example in the fund. We have a lot of other things that we could put in the fund.”
Trump noted many other nations have such investment funds and predicted that the US could eventually top Saudi Arabia’s fund size. “Eventually we’ll catch it,” he promised.
Trump put Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in charge of laying the groundwork for creating a the fund, which would likely require congressional approval.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration had studied the possibility of creating a sovereign wealth fund for national security investments, but the idea did not yield any concrete action before he left office last month.
Bessent said the administration’s goal was to have the fund open within the next 12 months, and Lutnick said another use of the fund could have been for the government to take an profit-earning stake in vaccine manufacturers.
“The extraordinary size and scale of the USgovernment and the business it does with companies should create value for American citizens,” Lutnick told reporters.