TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew has been invited and is expected to attend President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, according to three people familiar with the matter, two of whom are Trump's transition officials.
Zhou has been invited by the president-elect's team to sit at the podium in front of the Capitol, where Trump will be sworn in as president.
One of the officials said Chew is expected to sit with CEOs and leaders of other big tech platforms, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also plans to attend and sit with other executives, a Trump transition official said.
NBC News has reached out to representatives for TikTok and Google for comment. TikTok declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond.
The New York Times was the first media outlet to report on the inauguration.
Zhou's attendance at the meeting comes as the popular TikTok app prepares for a possible shutdown on Sunday, which would take effect that day if the Supreme Court does not overturn a U.S. ban.
The nine justices on the conservative-majority court heard oral arguments last week on whether to enforce the ban passed by Congress last year and signed into law by President Joe Biden. The justices' comments and questions during arguments suggested they were likely to uphold the law that effectively bans the platform.
The law requires TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest the company. Noel Francisco, a lawyer for the company, said that without a sale, the platform used by millions of Americans would "shut down."
Congress passed the legislation last year with strong bipartisan support, and many who voted for the bill argued they had data and national security concerns because of China's involvement in the app.
However, the Biden administration is weighing options to continue using TikTok in the United States after the ban, NBC News reported on Wednesday, and officials expected to join Trump's second administration have also said they hope to delay the ban or find a suitable one. Candidate. A workaround.
Mike Walz, Trump's incoming White House national security adviser, said on Fox News on Wednesday that Trump would find a way to keep the app and protect people's data: "That's the deal we have in front of us," he said when asked about the new reports from the United States. The Washington Post says Trump is considering an executive order that would temporarily keep TikTok in place if Trump's attorney general nominee Pam Bondi bans the company, but she She also declined to say whether she would do so during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. If she is confirmed, a TikTok ban will be implemented.