Former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, who led the team into bankruptcy in 2011 before he sold it for $2 billion, told Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan that his attempt to buy TikTok isn’t about him alone.
“I’m not looking to be the CEO of TikTok. We call it the people’s bid,” he explained, “because we want this to empower people and to stop this nonsense where we’re exploiting people by scraping their data and taking advantage of them, and in the case of Tiktok, actually creating a national security threat.”
McCourt’s Project Liberty accelerated its bid to buy the social media platform Thursday. Axios reported members of Project Liberty have pooled at least $20 billion of capital to take over TikTok, although McCourt’s bid for the U.S. portion of the company is expected to be far below that number.
McCourt also said the team’s lawyers have indicated there is “very little chance” TikTok parent company ByteDance will successfully appeal a ban in the United States. On Friday, three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a request to dismiss the new law.
The law, signed in April, requires ByteDance to sell the platform to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19, 2025, the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump, or face a total ban in the U.S. The United States accounts for 170 million of TikTok’s users.
“We don’t want to see it banned,” McCourt said. “I’d add that President, President elect Trump, has also said he doesn’t want to see it banned.”
His team has been working for the last eight months “on the assumption that the legislation would be upheld and that there would be a sale. So that’s where we are right now, and we’re working very, very hard to be in a position to buy the U.S. portion of TikTok so it’s not shut down.”
You can watch the interview with Frank McCourt in the video above.
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