The Donald Trump administration, which brokered the sale of TikTok's U.S. business rights, will receive a $10 billion (about 15 trillion won) fee from investors.
According to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on the 13th, investors who acquired TikTok equity, including Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) investment firm MGX, agreed to pay the U.S. government a $10 billion fee.
The investors already acquired equity from TikTok's parent company, ByteDance Ltd., in January and paid about $2.5 billion to the Treasury. They plan to pay the fee aggregates of $10 billion in full.
WSJ reported that it is highly unusual for the government to collect such an amount as a fee in the process of assisting a company sale or other transaction. Considering that Vice President JD Vance assessed the corporate value of TikTok's U.S. division at $14 billion, the fee the U.S. government will receive amounts to 70% of that.
This is an unusually large sum even compared with typical M&A fees received by investment banks (IB). Bank of America is said to have received a $130 million fee in a transaction last year in which railroad operator Union Pacific acquired rival Norfolk Southern for $71.5 billion, which is cited as the largest fee an IB has received from a single transaction in Wall Street history.