President Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, could be among the investors involved in a deal to bring the popular video app TikTok under U.S. ownership.
“A man named Lachlan is involved,” he said in a recorded interview on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” He and Rupert Murdoch are “probably going to be in the group, I think they’re going to be in the group.”
The potential investment would be made by the Fox Corporation, the conservative media behemoth that operates Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, according to a person with knowledge of the talks.
The interest comes as ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, races to line up investors for a deal that would separate the app’s U.S. business from that of its Chinese parent. That move is required under a federal law passed last year amid national security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China. President Trump has delayed the enforcement of that law four times, most recently last week.
Negotiators have been working on a deal for months. Mr. Trump said last week that there had been significant progress, including support from Xi Jinping, China’s leader. New investors would join to dilute Chinese ownership in the company to less than 20 percent to satisfy the law.
Mr. Trump also said in the Fox News interview that Larry Ellison, a founder of the software giant Oracle, and Michael Dell, chief executive of the computer maker Dell Technologies, were involved in the deal. Oracle, which already provides computing resources for TikTok, is among those expected to take a stake in the new business. Mr. Dell is also considering investing in the company, a person familiar with the situation said.
The possible investors, Mr. Trump said, “love this country, so I think they’re going to do a really good job.”
The potential investments also raise questions about whether the new owners would have the power to influence the tone or content on the app. The Murdochs have run their media businesses with a firm conservative tilt. Mr. Ellison is a supporter of Mr. Trump’s. He and his family are also increasingly interested in media; he helped finance a bid by his son, David, to buy the entertainment giant Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery could be next.
Some of ByteDance’s largest investors, which include General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group, plan to stay on as investors in the new company. The private equity firm Silver Lake has also had conversations in recent weeks about investing in a deal. Mr. Dell has longstanding ties to Silver Lake, working with the firm about a decade ago to take his company private.
But a deal includes unique wrinkles. Investors have been in discussions to pay a multibillion-dollar transaction fee to the U.S. government, four people familiar with the talks said. Such a structure is highly unusual, but reminiscent of other moves by Mr. Trump into U.S. deal making.