TikTok, the popular video-sharing app, may soon undergo a radical change of ownership.
Less than 24 hours after a bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that would force China’s ByteDance to sell its app so as not to face a nationwide blockade, a consortium of American entrepreneurs immediately stepped forward.
Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that he is putting together a team of investors to submit a bid to buy the social network.
“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Mnuchin said in an interview on CNBC Thursday morning – where he claimed TikTok is likely “unprofitable”, but still “worth a lot of money”. He also specified that no entity will own more than 10 percent control.
“There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” he said. Mnuchin further claimed to have evidence from his experience in the administration that TikTok allows users to “collect an awful lot of data.”
Despite ByteDance finding itself up to its neck in controversy, while hoping to see the measure rejected in the Senate, the negotiation in the making certainly does not look like an easy one. Indeed, a Chinese law enacted in 2020 equates TikTok with “sensitive technology” that cannot be sold to any company outside China. Beijing authorities have also stated that they oppose any forced sale that includes divestment to a foreign owner, much less a U.S. one.
TikTok, which boasts more than 150 million users in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese technology company ByteDance Ltd.
Members of Congress claim, however, that ByteDance is under the covert control of the Chinese government, which reportedly has the right to demand access to the app’s customer data in the United States at any time, thus posing a serious threat to U.S. national security. At the root of the concern is a set of national security laws in China that require national companies to cooperate with the collection of intelligence information.
