Trump’s ex-treasury secretary is trying to buy TikTok amid ban threat
Ex-President Donald Trump’s former treasury secretary is putting together a plan to buy TikTok after US lawmakers moved a step closer to banning the social media app.
Steve Mnuchin, who served under Trump from 2017 to 2021, on Thursday said he is assembling an investor group to acquire the popular platform. He revealed his plans a day after the House passed legislation that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell it within six months or face a nationwide ban.
TikTok’s future is uncertain as the bill heads to the Senate.
‘I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,’ Mnuchin told CNBC’s Squawk Box. ‘It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.’
Mnuchin is the head of Liberty Strategic Capital, which has SoftBank Vision Fund as a limited partner. SoftBank in 2018 invested in ByteDance.
The former treasury secretary said that TikTok ‘should be owned by US businesses’, explaining that ‘there’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China’.
Mnuchin did not disclose a potential valuation for TikTok or name other investors would would be involved in a hypothetical deal.
It is not clear if the Chinese government would allow ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American buyer.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has said they are not planning to sell the platform, which has 170million users in the US.
While president, Trump backed efforts to ban TikTok, which government officials believe could threaten national security if the Chinese government forces ByteDance to share user data.
But Trump flip-flopped last week to opposing a ban, arguing that Facebook and ‘Enemy of the People’ Mark Zuckerberg who owns Meta would benefit from a TikTok shutdown.
Despite Trump’s opposition to the legislation, a majority of House Republicans voted in favor of a ban and the bill made a rare bipartisan advance.
President Joe Biden has indicated he will sign the bill into law if it makes it to his desk.
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