The $10 Billion TikTok Scam

In 2020, the United States government — backed by bipartisan congressional action, the Biden administration, and a unanimous Supreme Court ruling — moved to ban TikTok from American devices. The legal basis was clear and well-documented: TikTok's parent company ByteDance, headquartered in China, was legally subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party and had been used to build an algorithmic surveillance database on American citizens.

Donald Trump, during his first term, actually agreed with this assessment and attempted his own ban. Then something changed. Trump's major Wall Street donors — most notably Jeff Yass of Susquehanna International Group, a firm with deep ByteDance investments — whispered in his ear. Trump started using TikTok on the campaign trail. And once back in power, he reversed the ban entirely.

What happened next is one of the most brazen pay-to-play corruption schemes in modern American political history — conducted in plain sight, involving foreign sovereign wealth funds, the president's personal crypto company, a massive media consolidation play, and a "finder's fee" that no legitimate government transaction would ever justify.

The TikTok corruption doesn't exist in isolation. Running in parallel is a scandal involving Jared Kushner — Trump's son-in-law, unelected and unvetted by Congress — that implicates the same foreign governments, the same money flows, and the same contempt for American ethics law.

In 2024, Kushner made a public commitment: he would not raise new capital for his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, during Trump's second term. He said he had enough. He would not exploit his proximity to presidential power for personal gain.

That promise lasted less than a year. In 2026, Kushner is in the middle of a $5 billion fundraising campaign — targeting the exact same Saudi Arabian, UAE, and Qatari officials he is simultaneously "negotiating with" in his role as Trump's special envoy on Iran and Middle East policy.

After leaving the first Trump administration, Kushner raised a $2 billion fund from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) — despite having no prior private equity experience. That $2 billion arrived within months of Kushner's White House tenure, raising immediate questions about what the Saudis were purchasing.

Now, with a second term underway, Kushner has returned to the same well — the same Saudi, UAE, and Qatari sovereign funds he meets with as an official U.S. envoy. The overlap of his diplomatic role and fundraising activities is not incidental. It is the product of an administration that has fully dissolved the line between public service and private enrichment.

Note the connection: MGX — the UAE fund that purchased 49% of Trump's crypto company — is the same ecosystem Kushner is drawing his investors from. These are not separate stories. They are one story about one administration selling American foreign policy to the highest bidder.

This is not merely political corruption in the colloquial sense. Multiple provisions of the United States Constitution and federal law are directly implicated by the documented facts of the TikTok deal and the Kushner fundraising operation.