Frank McCourt, civic entrepreneur, executive chairman of McCourt Global and founder of Project Liberty, speaks at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival in New York City on May 22, 2024.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
Frank McCourt said his Project Liberty consortium, which has bid to buy TikTok, would be comfortable sharing ownership of the app so long as it’s hosted on tech developed by his nonprofit.
“I’m okay with whatever is legal … and the U.S. government is OK with,” McCourt told CNBC in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
McCourt’s remarks come after President Donald Trump last week said that he would like the U.S. to have a “50% ownership position in a joint venture” in TikTok.
The Supreme Court last week upheld the law requiring ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok or face an effective ban. Since TikTok was not sold by the law’s Sunday deadline, the app was shut down for American users and also removed from Apple and Google’s app stores. But TikTok began restoring some services Sunday after Trump said he would sign an executive order to delay a federal ban of the app, which he did on Monday.
The executive order allows TikTok to keep operating for another 75 days.
With all the twists and turns, McCourt said he’s open to any commercial agreement, including a 50% stake rather than full ownership.
“I’m not going to be the decision maker there. You know, this is President Trump’s deal now it’s in his … administration, and you know, it will all get sorted out,” McCourt said.
“We’re not flexible about the values and principles of Project Liberty, right?” he added. “We’re totally flexible about commercial arrangements, as long as they abide by the law.”
McCourt’s condition is that TikTok must run on technology called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, or DSNP, which is overseen by the Project Liberty Institute, the nonprofit founded by the billionaire.
Focus on user data
McCourt has been a critic of the way social media and internet companies collect user data and target them with ads. He has said that this current model, where the user has little control over their own data, needs to change.
DSNP is focused on making those changes. The protocol is a technology that third-party developers can build apps on top of, but users are able to choose how their data is used and who has access to it.
If they don’t like a particular app, they can migrate their content and data to another service built on top of the DSNP.
McCourt’s goal is to purchase TikTok and put it on the DSNP.
The “user experience would be very similar, with the one big exception — owning your identity and your data and your relationships would be quite different than how Tiktok currently operates,” McCourt said.
“So if Project Liberty, or anybody else … buys U.S. Tiktok and does a poor job, the underlying technology will allow that whole user base to go to a different app that’s doing a better job,” he added.
Project Liberty has bid to buy TikTok without its core algorithm.
Project Liberty is “not interested in the algorithm or the Chinese technology,” McCourt said, although he admitted that TikTok is “worth less” without the algorithm. Many experts have said that TikTok’s success is in large part due to its algorithm, which keeps users hooked on the app.
Other buyers swirling
Its unclear if ByteDance will sell TikTok or if China will agree to any kind of sale of the app in the U.S.
Project Liberty is organizing the bid for TikTok with a consortium of other investors. It is dubbed the People’s Bid For TikTok, but there are other potential buyers swirling.
Trump said on Tuesday that he’d consider the possibility of Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok. The comments come after a report that the Chinese government has considered a plan that would involve Musk acquiring the operations.
YouTube star MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, along with a group of investors is also preparing to make a bid for TikTok, his lawyer confirmed this week to various media outlets.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian, Hakyung Kim and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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