Former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will form a group of investors to buy TikTok from China's ByteDance – a bill approved by the House of Representatives to force the divestment of the platform poses a tangible threat to its further operation in the US.
“I think the law should be passed, and I think it (TikTok) should be sold. This is a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steven Mnuchin, now head of Liberty Strategic Capital, said in an interview with CNBC. The two companies have common ground: Liberty Strategic is a partner of SoftBank Vision, and the latter invested in ByteDance in 2018. The bill has now been sent to the Senate, where its prospects are still unclear, but the US President has said that he will sign the law if it reaches his desk. “It should be owned by an American business. The Chinese will never allow an American company to own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.
There is no clarity yet on whether Chinese authorities will allow ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US buyer. The platform administration strongly opposes this measure and is going to fight. The Chinese Foreign Minister called the initiative of American parliamentarians “the logic of robbers.” At its last funding round in 2023, ByteDance was valued at $220 billion. The price of the US division of the platform is likely to be lower. The platform's most valuable asset and, according to lawmakers, its most formidable weapon is its recommendation algorithm, developed in China. Without it, selling the platform to potential buyers would be significantly less attractive. Mnuchin did not specify how much the social network could be valued at or who would be the investors in the deal. Earlier it became known that former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and OpenAI head Sam Altman showed interest in buying TikTok.
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