AsianFin -- A deal will be reached to ensure that TikTok would not be shuttered by the end of the 75-day extension, General Atlantic CEO Bill Ford told Axios during an event on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.
"Yes," said Ford, when asked if a deal will get done. "It's in everybody's interest."
"We'll get on with it, as soon as maybe the end of the week in terms of negotiating what might work ... The Chinese government, the U.S. government and the company and the board all have to be involved in this conversation," Ford said, adding that there could be solutions "short of divestiture."
Ford is on ByteDance's board of directors and General Atlantic is a major investor in TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
U.S. President Trump signed an executive rder on Monday, giving ByteDance 75 more days to work out a change-of-control deal, as required by a law signed last year. As of Trump's order, ByteDance had not engaged in negotiations with any potential buyer, despite the pending ban.
Ford also argued that the Biden administration is partially to blame for the situation reaching a boiling point, arguing that it wasn't "engaging with us on a real dialogue."
However, he acknowledged that Trump tried banning TikTok in the waning days of his first term, before changing course during the recent campaign.