Realty mogul Frank McCourt plans bid for TikTok in US
Frank McCourt, a real estate mogul with ambitions to improve the web, on Wednesday said he plans to build a consortium to bid for short-form video platform TikTok's US business.
McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and executive chairman of investment firm McCourt Global, is an unlikely contender for the ByteDance Ltd-owned app. TikTok's US assets were valued at $35 billion to $40 billion by Bloomberg Intelligence analysts.
President Joe Biden's decision to force TikTok's Chinese parent to sell the US app or face a ban, via a law signed this year as part of a more hawkish stance toward China, has inspired a diverse cast of characters to talk up potential bids.
ByteDance, which is challenging the US law in court, has said it has no intention of selling the asset. It's too early to know what price TikTok will fetch or if it will be sold, McCourt said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. He said he has not spoken with TikTok or ByteDance, but «other actors» had encouraged him to move forward. «This is early in a process. It's still very noisy.»
McCourt also said he is not interested in TikTok's underlying algorithm, the proprietary code that makes the app so effective at predicting what kinds of videos its users want to see. «We're not interested in the algorithm,» he said. «We're interested in an alternative web where people own and control their data, own and control their identity.»
McCourt, who sold the Dodgers for about $2 billion in 2012,
