Multimillionaire businessman Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame said Friday he and his investor group are ready to pay $20 billion to purchase TikTok, which is facing a U.S. ban if its parent company that has ties to the China's Communist Party doesn’t divest itself from the popular app and find an outside buyer by Sunday.
O’Leary’s investor group is led by billionaire Frank McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers who will be with President-elect Donald Trump to cement a deal, The Washington Times reported Friday.
O’Leary said the group is willing to purchase the app without the proprietary algorithm that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is determined to keep.
“We’ve got a valid syndicate,” O’Leary told Yahoo Finance, according to the Times. “We’re prepared to put up as much as $20 billion, and we don’t need the algorithm. We don’t want the algorithm.”
Congress passed the legislation, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in April, over concerns that the company through China could pose privacy and national security threats to U.S. users. The legislation was tucked into an overall funding package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court in an unsigned opinion upheld the federal ban, ruling that Congress “has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
O’Leary said a U.S. ban would devastate ByteDance, given it has approximately 170 million American users, so it is in the Chinese company’s best interest to sell. He said he thinks his group can persuade them.
“I know all the shareholders,” he said, according to the Times. “So does Frank. We know who they are. We’ve known that for two years. I know them personally.”