Former Treasury Secretary Interested In Buying TikTok

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bipartisan bill that if signed into law would force ByteDance to either divest its flagship global app or face an effective ban on TikTok within the U.S.

“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who leads Liberty Strategic Capital, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.

The bill is now headed to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, though President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the legislation if reaches his desk.

“This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have highlighted TikTok’s reach in the U.S. — by its own estimates, 170 million Americans use the app — as providing the Chinese government with ready access and influence over the U.S.

Major tech investors, including Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois, have publicly or privately decried the social media platform as a pernicious influence.

Still, it remains unclear if Chinese government would permit ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. buyer. TikTok has lobbied furiously against the bill, including a concerted pitch to its user base and through videos on its platform.

ByteDance was valued at $220 billion at its last funding round in 2023, according to PitchBook data. While a discrete valuation for TikTok was not immediately clear, any sale price for the U.S. division would likely be less.

TikTok’s most valuable asset and, to lawmakers, its most worrying weapon, is its algorithm, which delivers tailored content to users and was developed in China. Any sale of TikTok without the algorithm would be significantly less attractive to potential buyers.