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Conservative media billionaire Rupert Murdoch and personal computer pioneer Michael Dell are expected to be part of a buyer group to extricate TikTok from Chinese ownership, according to US President Donald Trump.

Trump said on Sunday that Murdoch and his son Lachlan would “probably” be in an investor group buying shares in TikTok, owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, as part of a spin-off the White House has been negotiating for months.

Fox Corp, the owner of cable channel Fox News, is in talks to invest in TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter. The investment would not be made via the Murdoch family’s personal assets or News Corp, the people said.

Dell has been involved in negotiations for several months, said people briefed about the matter. No deal has been reached yet but they added that they “feel positive” that a deal will be done.

Trump, in an interview with Fox News, also confirmed that Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, will be part of the investor group that will raise a “tremendous amount of money” alongside other prominent individuals he did not name.

“I hate to tell you this, but a man named Lachlan is involved. Do you know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name . . . And Rupert is probably going to be in the group,” Trump said of the TikTok consortium.

Trump has been feuding with the Murdochs for months after suing their newspaper The Wall Street Journal for $10bn for publishing an article about a lewd birthday card he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has denied writing the card.

However, the Murdoch family remains a fixture in US conservatism. Earlier this month, Murdoch struck a deal with three of his children to hand over his media empire to Lachlan, securing the right-leaning stewardship of his media kingdom, which includes Fox News and the Journal.

Murdoch and Dell did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Separately, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Sunday a deal to have TikTok’s US operations majority owned and controlled by Americans will be reached this week. The White House negotiated for an independent TikTok board to be created, on which six of seven seats would be held by Americans, with ByteDance selecting the remaining director, Leavitt told Fox News.

The talks also centre around whether the social media application, which has roughly 170mn users in the US, will have its algorithm US-controlled. Leavitt said a deal signed in the coming days will put the algorithm in US hands, countering Beijing’s recent claims that the algorithm used by TikTok will remain in Chinese hands.

The White House’s comments signal that a resolution to TikTok’s future is nearing amid revived discussions between the US and China on a broad trade deal.

TikTok had faced a nationwide ban in the US after Congress passed legislation last year requiring ByteDance to divest its American operations because of national security concerns.

Trump and the Chinese were close to a spin-off deal in April. That included a broad consortium of new US investors, with stake-building by private capital groups Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake, alongside existing investors such as General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group.

However, Trump’s “liberation day” trade war in which the US levied 145 per cent tariffs against China put the deal on hold.

Recently, trade talks have restarted, with Trump saying on Friday he would meet President Xi Jinping in South Korea next month and travel to China for a summit early next year in their first meeting since 2019.

The positive tide on trade negotiations has revived TikTok’s spin-off deal. Vice-president JD Vance and Treasury secretary Scott Bessent also convinced the Chinese to separate the deal from the broader trade talks, a person briefed on the matter told the Financial Times.

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The addition to the TikTok ownership group of the Murdochs, whose media empire has been a bedrock of the conservative movement in the US, would further cement right-leaning owners atop the world’s largest social media properties.

Elon Musk, Trump’s largest financial backer in the 2024 presidential election, controls X, the parent company of Twitter. Meanwhile, Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, who donated $1mn to Trump’s inauguration.

Fox Corp had more than $5.3bn in cash on hand at the end of June. Asked during an earnings call last month how he might deploy the money, chief executive Lachlan Murdoch said: “We’re always looking at opportunities.”