Billionaire businessman and real estate mogul Frank McCourt said he’s putting together a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business, adding to the number of investors hoping to benefit from a new federal law that requires TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the popular platform or face a ban.
The announcement, posted late Tuesday on McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative, said the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers was organizing the bid in consultation with the investment bank Guggenheim Securities and “with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform’s design and purpose.”
If a sale occurs, McCourt said he would plan to restructure TikTok and give more agency to people “over their digital identities and data” by migrating the platform to an open-source protocol that allows for more transparency.
Other investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have expressed a desire to purchase TikTok. However, parent company ByteDance has already said it does not plan to sell the platform. The Chinese government is also unlikely to approve a sale – especially not one that includes the recommendation engine that powers the videos that populates users’ feeds.
