Billionaire investor Frank McCourt, former owner and chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dodger Stadium, says he is investigating the legality of the Trump administration’s deal that would see TikTok purchased by a coalition that reportedly includes Oracle, Silver Lake and the Saudi-owned MGX.
In an interview with CNN’s Terms of Service podcast, McCourt stopped short of saying he would challenge the deal in court or attempt to join the ownership group. But the information that has been publicly released so far is insufficient and doesn’t address whether the national security concerns with TikTok have been addressed, he said.
The status of the sale of TikTok in the U.S. remains in limbo as China and the U.S. continue jockeying over trade issues and rare-earth materials. “I’ve asked and engaged some really smart people to analyze (the deal) the best they can, with the information available, because there are still missing pieces with what this all means,” McCourt told CNN.
Project Liberty, a non-profit initiative that seeks to transform how the internet works, teamed with several private equity funds, “Shark Tank” judge Kevin O’Leary, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and others to, submit a bid to buy TikTok in the weeks before Donald Trump took office. That offer proposed buying TikTok without its algorithm, which China had been unwilling to allow to be sold previously.
The Project Liberty offer, which called itself the People’s Bid for TikTok, valued TikTok’s American operations (without the algorithm) at $20 billion – $6 billion more than the deal brokered by the White House. The group said it planned to restructure the social media company to collect less data on users and would use a new algorithm created by the Project Liberty nonprofit instead.
The White House’s proposed deal did not address which companies or investors would make up the coalition that would own and operate the U.S. version of TikTok. And there was no justification or explanation for the $14-billion valuation (ByteDance has an estimated value of $330 billion – so the low figure for TikTok’s U.S. operations left investors confused). It’s also still unknown if the U.S. will take a revenue stream from the new company, though Trump said the U.S. “comes out great” in the deal.
Perhaps most importantly, though, is where China stands on things. Trump has said Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the White House deal the go ahead. Yet no representatives of ByteDance attended the signing ceremony for the executive order. And China’s government has not commented about the deal since the EO was signed.
McCourt, to be clear, isn’t objecting to the White House deal at this point, but says it’s “too early to say” what next steps he’ll take in response to it. One area of interest to him, though, is the privacy guards that will be put into place.
“Big tech platforms are scraping and accumulating our data, hyper, micro-profiling us, and now they’re not just selling us ads, but they’re manipulating us,” he said. “Our data is our personhood in a digital age … We should share what we want to share about ourselves.”
If TikTok is out of his reach, McCourt says he still has plans for the Project Liberty technology that he had hoped would run the site. He plans to transform it into an AI agent that controls when and how a user’s personal information is shared as they explore the Web and interact with other AI systems.