Trump signs order to create sovereign wealth fund that could buy TikTok | Trump administration

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday ordering the US treasury and commerce departments to create a sovereign wealth fund and said it may also be used to purchase the social media platform TikTok.

A sovereign wealth fund would act as an investment fund for the country, operating outside of the Federal Reserve and the treasury department. Few details were offered about the creation of the fund, which would require congressional approval, including where the cash for a potential fund would come from.

“We have tremendous potential,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Monday afternoon. “I think in a short period of time, we’d have one of the biggest funds.”

Trump said that the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, would be spearheading efforts to create a sovereign national fund.

“We’re going to stand this thing up within the next 12 months,” Bessent told reporters. “We are going to monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet for the American people.”

More than 100 countries have sovereign wealth funds, including China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Twenty US states currently have sovereign wealth funds, including Alaska, which has the largest fund of all states with a value of more than $80bn in 2024.

Controversy has grown over the years of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which has funded ventures in Silicon Valley. Critics say the sovereign wealth fund is used as a means of foreign influence while the country has been accused of human rights violations.

Trump floated the idea of a sovereign wealth fund on the campaign trail, saying in September that it can use “all this money that will be taken in through tariffs and other intelligent things”.

“We’ll have the greatest sovereign wealth fund of them all,” he said at the time.

It is unclear how lawmakers in Congress will respond to the creation of a fund. While Congress would need to approve the creation of a fund, it would have less control over it once approved.

Senior officials in the Biden administration had been quietly working on a sovereign wealth fund, with an eye on funding domestic infrastructure and manufacturing, before the US election in November, according to multiple reports.

Trump said on Monday that the fund could be used to facilitate the sale of TikTok.

“We’re going to be doing something perhaps with TikTok, perhaps not,” he said.

TikTok, which has about 170 million American users, was briefly taken offline just before a law requiring its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban that took effect on 19 January.

Trump, after taking office on 20 January, signed an executive order seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of the law.

The US president has said that he was in talks with multiple people over TikTok’s purchase and would probably have a decision on the popular app’s future in February.

Since returning to the White House Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders on a vast range of issues from tariffs to trans rights that promise to upend huge swathes of American life and have already caused chaos in the federal government.

Reuters contributed reporting