Former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Says He Wants to Buy TikTok – 03/14/2024 at 6:32 pm.
Former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on May 2, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California (AFP / Patrick T. Fallon)
Former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday that he wants to bring together a group of investors to buy the social network TikTok, while the United States Congress may force its parent company, Chinese ByteDance, to sell it.
“It’s a great company. I’m going to form a group to buy TikTok,” said the former Republican minister in Donald Trump’s government (2017-2021), “because (the platform) should be controlled by American interests”.
“I talked to a lot of people” about the project, said Steven Mnuchin, a former director at investment bank Goldman Sachs, who declined to be named.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday adopted a text that, in the event of a favorable vote in the Senate and promulgation by US President Joe Biden, would force ByteDance to sell TikTok, under penalty of banning the video sharing network in the United States.
The proposed legislation would require TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the app within 180 days or face being banned from Apple and Google’s app stores in the United States.
The outcome of the vote in the Senate, however, appears uncertain. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the upper house, who has a majority with the support of three independent senators, declined to take a position on the text.
Elected officials from both the Republican and Democratic camps who voted for the bill are concerned about the social network’s Chinese authorities trying to exploit the data of American users or promote propaganda on the platform.
TikTok has systematically denied these allegations, ensuring that it will deny any potential request for access by the Chinese government.
– “Rogue Methods” –
China condemned the “rogue methods” on Thursday after the vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
Wang Wenbin, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, in Beijing, August 8, 2022 (AFP / Noel Sallis)
“If the so-called pretext of national security can be used to arbitrarily exclude successful companies from other countries, then there is no fairness or justice,” said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“When someone sees another person’s good thing and wants to take it from him, these are definitely thug methods,” he added.
“The text voted in the American House of Representatives goes against the principle of fair competition and international rules on economics and trade,” Wang Wenbin said.
“The United States should (…) cease pressure aimed at unfairly excluding foreign companies from its market”, declared a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, warning that China would “take all necessary measures” to protect its businesses.
He did not specify what these measures might entail.
Shortly before the official Chinese backlash, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appealed to the app’s American users.
“Listen to yourselves,” he said on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) after the vote, less than eight months before November’s presidential election.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a hearing at the US Senate in Washington on January 31, 2024 (AFP / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS)
“We will not stop defending you and will continue to do everything in our power, including exercising our legal rights, to protect this amazing platform we have built with you,” he added.
The Leader estimated that the law would threaten “300,000 jobs” in the United States, particularly threatening to deprive “small businesses that rely on TikTok” of “billions of dollars” in revenue.
Before Steven Mnuchin’s exit, no potential buyer had officially expressed interest in the social network that claims 170 million users in the United States.
Yet the Wall Street Journal reported that Bobby Kotick, the former boss of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, had expressed his interest to ByteDance’s co-founder, Zhang Yiming.
TikTok’s value is difficult to estimate, especially in the case of a forced sale. In 2020, ByteDance valued itself at $60 billion when Donald Trump’s government sought to force it to part with it, according to Bloomberg.
After leaving the US government, Steven Mnuchin founded Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity firm with special interests in the technology sector.
It quickly raised $2.5 billion from investors, including a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund, according to the New York Times.
Liberty recently expanded its reach by recapitalizing ailing American regional lender New York Community Bancorp to the tune of $1.05 billion, along with a group of investors.
