President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the U.S. to begin developing a government-owned investment fund, which he suggested could generate profits from TikTok if he succeeds in securing an American buyer for the platform.
Trump signed an order on his first day of office to grant TikTok until early April to find an approved partner or buyer, but he's said he's looking for the U.S. to take a 50% stake in the massive social media platform. He said Monday in the Oval Office that TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, was an example of what he could put in a new U.S. sovereign wealth fund.
"We're going to create a lot of wealth for the fund," Trump told reporters. "And I think it's about time that this country had a 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.”
Sovereign wealth funds invest in assets, such as stocks, bonds and real estate. They are typically funded by a country’s budgetary surpluses, which the U.S. currently does not have.
Trump noted many other nations have such investment funds and predicted that the U.S. could eventually top Saudi Arabia's fund size. "Eventually, we'll catch it," he promised.
There are over 90 sovereign wealth funds around the world that manage over $8 trillion in assets, according to The International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds, a London-based organization made up of roughly 50 of these entities.
In the U.S., more than 20 sovereign wealth funds exist at the state level, according to analysis from the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based nonpartisan think-tank.
The largest ones – based in Alaska, New Mexico, and Texas – are financed through revenue that comes from oil, gas and mineral proceeds and are used to fund in-state programs, such as education. Though these funds are owned by governments, they tend to operate as standalone institutions with their own investment strategies and staff, the center said.
The president put Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, Trump's pick for commerce secretary, in charge of laying the groundwork for creating the fund, which would likely require congressional approval. The executive order says a plan for the fund – including recommendations for investment strategies and a governance model – has to be submitted to Trump within 90 days.
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.
Administration officials did not say how the fund would operate or be financed, but Trump has previously said it could be funded by "tariffs and other intelligent things."
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 a profit-earning stake in vaccine manufacturers.
"We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people," Bessent said. "There'll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people."
"The extraordinary size and scale of the U.S. government and the business it does with companies should create value for American citizens,” Lutnick told reporters.
One approach would be to convert the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) to function similar to a sovereign wealth fund, which the Trump administration reportedly considered in recent months, Bloomberg News reported. The DFC is a government agency that currently partners with private parties to finance projects in the developing world.
Clemence Landers, a former Treasury official who is now with the Center for Global Development, said there has been talk of repurposing the DFC, but setting up such a fund would require Congress.
“Obviously, you can't establish an institution by executive order, and more to the point is you can't fund an institution by executive order,” she said.
Investors said the news came as a surprise.
"Creating a sovereign wealth fund suggests that a country has savings that will go up and can be allocated to this," said Colin Graham, head of multi-asset strategies at Robeco in London. "The economic rules of thumb don't add up."
TikTok was supposed to be banned in the U.S. last month under a federal law that forces ByteDance to divest its stakes or face a ban. The law was passed in April with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by Biden. The two companies and some users quickly took legal action against the statute, which was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court last month.
After taking office, Trump, who had attempted to ban the popular app during his first term, directed the Justice Department to pause enforcement of the law for 75 days. The reprieve has given the company more time to work out a deal with the administration.
Several investors – including billionaire Frank McCourt and Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – have spoken publicly about their desire to purchase TikTok’s U.S. platform. Trump has said "many people” had also reached out to him privately about it. Last week, he said Microsoft was one of the U.S. companies eyeing the social media platform.
A San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup called Perplexity AI presented a proposal to ByteDance last month that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of an entity that combines TikTok's U.S. platform with Perplexity's business, a person familiar with the matter previously told the Associated Press (AP). If successful, the proposal would allow the U.S. government to have a sizable stake in that entity once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion.
