How dark horse Oracle became TikTok’s leading suitor

Oracle Corp. is one of the most lucrative but unflashy companies in Silicon Valley, a provider of business software and consulting services. Now, it is poised to become the U.S. partner for TikTok, the smash Chinese social-media app that has become a staple on the smartphones of millions of American teenagers.

The emergence of this oddball alliance is the latest twist in six weeks of negotiations that bear little resemblance to regular deal talks, driven by U.S.-China tensions, commercial rivalries and President Trump’s personal interventions.

TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. confirmed on Monday it had submitted a proposal to the U.S. government that the Beijing company says would solve the Trump administration’s longstanding security concerns about a Chinese-owned app possessing the data on American users.