TikTok lives to do its renegade dance another day. Muddled negotiations for the Chinese-owned video app have produced a deal in which Oracle and Walmart take a minority stake in a spin-off called TikTok Global. US president Donald Trump has agreed “in concept”. Who really wins? 

Any gain for US national security is modest. A US corporation will not take Tik Tok over. The promise of new partner Oracle to ensure US data privacy is useful only if TikTok’s 80 per cent owner ByteDance was covertly sending information to China. If not, little changes. US data are already stored on domestic servers.

So much for American dealmaking prowess. TikTok Global will only be majority-owned by US investors if you count their two-fifths stake in ByteDance on top of the 20 per cent Oracle and Walmart plan to hold in TikTok. That gives US groups an economic interest of more than 50 per cent of TikTok without majority voting rights.