Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the US, Report informs referring to CNBC.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bipartisan bill that if signed into law would force ByteDance to either divest its flagship global app or face an effective ban on TikTok within the US.
“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who leads Liberty Strategic Capital, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.
The bill is now headed to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, though President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the legislation if reaches his desk.
“This should be owned by US businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have highlighted TikTok’s reach in the US — by its own estimates, 170 million Americans use the app — as providing the Chinese government with ready access and influence over the US.