TikTok CEO meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with President-elect Trump in Florida on Monday, becoming the latest tech leader to hold talks with the incoming president ahead of Inauguration Day.

Trump and Chew met on Monday at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., a source familiar with the matter confirmed to The Hill.

The meeting comes as Chew's TikTok faces an uncertain path in the United States.

The platform filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court to delay a law that would ban the video-sharing platform nationwide as early as next month if the company does not divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Trump has signaled some opposition to the divest-or-ban law on the campaign trail and promised to "save TikTok" without offering many specifics on how he plans to protect the app.

When asked Monday whether he would seek to prevent the ban from taking effect, the president-elect said he would "take a look."

“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” he said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, claiming he “won youth by 34 points, and there are those that say that TikTok had something to do with it.”

It is not clear whether the comments came before or after his meeting with Chew.

TikTok's application asks the court to put the Jan. 19 divest-or-ban deadline on hold until the justices resolve TikTok's First Amendment claims on their normal docket.

The law in question was signed by President Biden last April, and established a timeline for ByteDance to sell the platform or be prohibited from U.S. app stores and networks.

ByteDance has contended divestment is practically impossible, meaning that the law effectively amounts to a nationwide ban of the video-sharing platform.

Trump has reportedly met with a series of tech leaders this month, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He is expected to meet with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, a source familiar with the matter told The Hill, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later this week.

Some observers have suggested the moves by several tech leaders are part of a broader effort by the industry to court Trump ahead of his second term, especially in the wake of his alliance with Elon Musk, the owner of the social platform X, SpaceX, and Tesla.

Meta and Amazon announced last week they were each contributing $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund, while OpenAI's Sam Altman said he would give the same amount from his personal funds.

Brett Samuels contributed.

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