Washington [USA], May 17: Billionaire Frank McCourt, former owner of the famous Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club, said on May 15 that he is working with other investors to buy TikTok from Chinese company ByteDance , according to South China newspaper. Morning Post .
Mr. McCourt is a strong critic of social media. He resigned as CEO of the investment business of the same name to launch an effort to give online users more control over their personal data.
Contrary to other potential investors, billionaire McCourt said he did not want TikTok 's algorithm . Due to lack of financial capacity, he is consulting investment bank Guggenheim Securities to call on other organizations and individual investors to participate. One of Mr. McCourt's supporters is Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
According to Forbes , Mr. McCourt owns a net worth of $1.4 billion. He sold the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2 billion in 2012 and in 2016 bought the French soccer club Marseille.
If the deal is successful, Mr. McCourt said he would restructure TikTok and give users more autonomy over their digital identities and data, by moving the platform to an open source protocol. for more transparency.
"I've been involved in a lot of big deals and things often take different turns. There's a distinct possibility that ByteDance would be willing to sell TikTok in the US without including the algorithm, which we don't want, because So we want everything to be prepared," the American billionaire told Axios .
ByteDance is bound by a new law passed by the US to sell TikTok or the platform will be banned. US officials cited national security reasons to pass this law.
ByteDance has sued to stop this and has no intention of selling TikTok, even though there are many people who want to buy it, including former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper