Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is currently working on a bid to buy TikTok, according to reports from several reputable news outlets. And while it remains to be seen whether TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will agree to a sale to anyone, McCourt’s background in utopian tech advocacy makes him an interesting figure to enter the race.
The U.S. Congress passed legislation in March that will force TikTok to be sold or face a total ban in the U.S., ostensibly over national security concerns. ByteDance is based in China and bipartisan hawks of the New Cold War insist Beijing is capable of monitoring and manipulating data on TikTok, supposedly brainwashing the 170 million Americans who currently use the app.
And that’s where potential buyers now come in, including investor groups led by people like former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, reality show host Kevin O’Leary, and now Frank McCourt.
“We want all the capital to be values-aligned [around] a new and better version of the internet, where individuals are respected and they own and control their identity and their data,” McCourt told Semafor.
McCourt’s rather utopian vision of the internet isn’t just the ramblings of a billionaire kook. He created an initiative in 2021 called Project Liberty that advocates for open internet protocols and has the backing of some big names in the world of technology. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, is quoted in Semafor’s latest article praising McCourt, saying that he will, “embrace the critical values of privacy, data sovereignty, and user mental health.”
McCourt has also written a book, titled Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age, released in March, laying out his case for humanizing the internet. It starts, McCourt insists, by reimagining the infrastructure of the web with new open protocols.
But the big question among all of this: Will ByteDance even sell TikTok to American investors? At this point, it seems unlikely. TikTok filed a lawsuit last week to block the legislation on First Amendment grounds and the tech company makes a pretty compelling case. With roughly half the U.S. population currently using the app, it would indeed be chilling to the speech of millions if TikTok was suddenly taken away.
But as we all know, laws are fake and any court in the country can rationalize the most hypocritical ruling as being a matter of principle. The U.S. spent the past two decades shaming other countries for banning American websites when other nations said they had national security concerns. Now it’s our turn to ban apps we don’t like, simply because we got outplayed at our own game. Whether guys like McCourt can snap up TikTok amid all this confusion remains to be seen.