Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Venture Liberty bids for TikTok

Simply 10 days earlier than the U.S. ban on TikTok goes into impact, businessman Frank McCourt’s web advocacy group Venture Liberty introduced Thursday it has submitted a proposal to purchase the social media web site from Chinese language know-how firm ByteDance.

Venture Liberty and its companions, often called “The Folks’s Bid for TikTok,” would restructure the app to exist on an American-owned platform and prioritize customers’ digital security, the undertaking mentioned in a assertion.

“We have put ahead a proposal to ByteDance to understand Venture Liberty’s imaginative and prescient for a reimagined TikTok – one constructed on an American-made tech stack that places folks first,” McCourt, Venture Liberty’s founder, mentioned within the assertion. “By holding the platform alive with out counting on the present TikTok algorithm and avoiding a ban, hundreds of thousands of People can proceed to benefit from the platform.”

A Venture Liberty spokesperson mentioned the group was not disclosing the monetary phrases of the supply however confirmed that ByteDance has obtained the proposal.

CNBC has reached out to TikTok for remark.

The Supreme Courtroom will hear oral arguments on the ban, which was signed into legislation by President Joe Biden final April, on Friday. ByteDance has repeatedly refused to promote TikTok and appealed the laws on First Modification grounds.

The case has labored its means via the judicial system. Most lately, the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dominated in favor of the legislation on Dec. 6, writing that the federal government’s nationwide safety justifications for the ban had been sufficiently compelling.

In a Dec. 9 court docket submitting, TikTok mentioned that the ban would value U.S. small companies and social media creators $1.3 billion in income and earnings in only one month, and that greater than 7 million U.S. customers do enterprise on TikTok. 

The ban, often called the Defending People from Overseas Adversary Managed Purposes Act, prohibits the distribution and upkeep of the app whereas it’s beneath Chinese language possession.

The Folks’s Bid for TikTok goals emigrate TikTok to an open-source platform that permits customers extra management of their knowledge, as a part of Venture Liberty’s mission to construct a extra user-empowered web.

The initiative companions with funding banking group Guggenheim Securities and legislation agency Kirkland & Ellis. Its backers embrace digital security advocates, investor Kevin O’Leary and World Vast Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

Correction: An earlier model of this text described Venture Liberty as a nonprofit. It’s not.