Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary reveals why he'll soon own TikTok
On Sunday, President Donald Trump said, 'We have a buyer for TikTok ... I think I'll need probably China approval, and I think President Xi [Jinping] will probably do it... It's a group of very wealthy people.' Sources reportedly familiar with the deal told Bloomberg this week that the president was referring to a consortium that includes tech giant Oracle Corp, investment firm Blackstone and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The rush to find a buyer for TikTok has finally come to a head more than a year after President Joe Biden signed The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024. The law bans social networking services that are defined as 'foreign adversary-controlled' and gave them 270 days to come into compliance with the law.
The South Asian country banned the app over national security concerns in 2020, an outcome that is entirely possible in the US. In January, TikTok voluntarily shut down in the US for 14 hours after the US Supreme Court upheld the Protecting Americans law. Indeed, Republican lawmakers are growing frustrated with repeated delays in enforcement. 'The national security concerns and vulnerabilities are still there, and they have not gone away,' Republican Congressman Darin LaHood, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said last month. 'I would argue they've almost become more enhanced in many ways.'
At the heart of US national security concerns is TikTok's algorithm, which experts allege may compromise the private data of Americans and manipulate content that US citizens see in their feeds. TikTok has denied that it poses any risk to American users. Regardless, the social media platform faces the threat of a total shutdown inside the United States. September 17 is the current deadline for TikTok to find a buyer.
O'Leary, a Daily Mail columnist, maintains that he is 'quite confident' that his group – led by billionaire businessman Frank McCourt and including O'Leary, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and others – will be part of the TikTok solution. If anything, O'Leary said, various groups in the running for the acquisition may work together. 'Both sides are missing a piece of the puzzle,' he explained. 'Our group doesn't have any existing shareholders of ByteDance, but [Oracle's consortium] doesn't have any code that's going to be compliant with the order from Congress.'
The proposal from Oracle's camp would not be a viable one, according to O'Leary, because their bid, he says, involves licensing the algorithm from ByteDance. O'Leary predicts that the US government will require the new owner of TikTok to create a unique algorithm. That's where his syndicate comes in. 'There is not going to be a purchase of TikTok with the Chinese algorithm,' he said. 'We've spent millions of dollars on new technology that'll be the engine that is not owned by the Chinese.'
McCourt, who's leading the group called 'The People's Bid for TikTok,' previously told Forbes that users should have more control over their own data. 'Imagine a TikTok where you choose exactly how you experience content, instead of an algorithm secretly deciding for you,' McCourt said. Finally, O'Leary claims that one major hurdle remains – the opposition of the Chinese government. 'We still don't know if [Chinese President] Xi wants to sell TikTok USA to an American-owned entity,' O'Leary explained. 'It's a little unusual to announce the buying group if there's no seller.'
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