Of all the contenders to purchase TikTok from Chinese tech giant ByteDance so it doesn’t get banned in the United States, Frank McCourt is the only one thus far who has put his money where his mouth is.
McCourt, a Massachusetts billionaire who previously owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, leads a consortium that submitted a bid to ByteDance last week, days before the app is set to be banned if it still has Chinese ownership.
The chances that he will at least get an opportunity to buy the short-form video-sharing app appear to be improving, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer saying in a social media post on Thursday that it is “clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer for TikTok.” The ban on the app is scheduled to go into effect on Sunday, though Biden administration officials have said the government is unlikely to immediately enforce it.
McCourt declined to comment on how much the consortium has bid until ByteDance responds but has previously put the number at $20 billion. But in a conversation with Foreign Policy this week, McCourt says the consortium, known as Project Liberty, and its “People’s Bid for TikTok” are in service of a higher mission to reshape how the internet works.
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Foreign Policy: You’ve previously put a $20 billion number on TikTok. How much wiggle room is there for a negotiation should that number go up in the event of a sale?
Frank McCourt: It will all depend on what assets are being offered, right? It could go up, or it could go down, depending on what ends up being for sale. In the event that the app goes dark for a period of time and the user base erodes, that could diminish the value.
FP: What have your conversations with the Biden and Trump administrations been like on this?
FM: It’s a general agreement that it would be nice to keep the app lit up but only if the national security issues could be addressed. The ball is in ByteDance’s court right now. We have put an offer forward that doesn’t include the intellectual property or the algorithm, which China has made clear is not going to be sold under any circumstances.
I think the key to the transaction is a tech stack that the user base can be moved over to that is free of Chinese technology so that the U.S. Congress and President-elect Donald Trump can be convinced that it is no longer a weapon, so to speak.
FP: Are you still open to adding more people to the consortium?
FM: Yeah, we’re open to it, and there are some conversations that are ongoing. Remember that Project Liberty’s ambition and its mission are bigger than buying TikTok. It’s to reimagine and redesign and rebuild the internet.
We believe that the internet is broken as it’s currently designed—the incentives are very bad, and internet technology that essentially surveils people, steals their data, microprofiles them, and then targets them I think is just utterly inconsistent with democratic principles and individual rights.
We need an internet that is in harmony with democratic principles, respecting individuals and not dehumanizing them and returning agency to individuals (over) their data so that they can choose to benefit from it financially.
We think that that’s the next era of the internet, and that’s going to happen with or without a purchase of TikTok. We just think that buying TikTok would accelerate things and compress time so that this alternative, upgraded internet would have scale and therefore relevance sooner.
FP: Do you see this as being a global effort? How do you see this new internet contrasting with China’s version of the internet or Europe’s?
FM: I’ll put a finer point on it and say that it’s called the “Chinese version of the internet” for lack of a better description, (but it) is essentially the same methodology. It’s just to surveil, scrape, data-profile, and feed information to people. And it’s interesting to me because a surveillance-based, autocratic, centralized technology is very much in concert with the Chinese political ideology. There’s no dissonance there. So you can see where this type of internet works well if you’re an autocracy.
The U.S. version of the internet is at odds with our ideology and our belief system and that of all free societies. If you read the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, you’ll see how this type of technology that’s so exploitative is at odds with (the declaration), which is a proxy for the rights that free societies subscribe to.
I don’t think there is a European internet per se. Europe is doing a really good job of adopting policies and regulations but with very little ability to enforce them. Because what they’re trying to do is tame a beast. They’re trying to tame primarily American technology because given the choice in Europe, most people would choose American internet technology over Chinese technology—although there are 130 million Europeans using TikTok, so that may be gradually changing over time. (Editor’s note: According to TikTok’s most recent disclosure, that number grew to an average of 150 million “monthly active recipients” over the period from February 2024 to July 2024.)
But the point is that regulations alone are no match for the power of this technology—its reach, its wealth, its speed, its agility to work around regulations. Policymaking is a slow process; tech is very fast. So I think what Europe has found is that it’s hard to regulate tech that is completely at odds with your policy.
So why not build technology that is mindful of policy objectives and in harmony with policy objectives? I mean, isn’t that the solution? It seems kind of obvious to me, rather than this dichotomy of having technology run amuck and then people being impacted negatively by it and expecting policymakers to somehow do something about it when they’re dealing with less effective means.
FP: Have you had any interaction with the Chinese government in your efforts to buy TikTok?
FM: We’re interested in having that conversation, and it’s too early to tell whether that will be a successful channel of communication, but at the end of the day, we’re looking for a solution that can be a win-win.
As a business person, I always look for solutions where everybody is winning a little something. What we’ve come forward with seems to me to address all the stakeholders and has something in it for them. With President-elect Trump, it’s avoiding a ban; with Chinese President Xi Jinping, it’s addressing his concerns about the algorithm and Chinese intellectual property; with the investors, it’s being able to get a return on investment as opposed to having it wiped out if the app is just shut down; for American citizens, it’s protecting them from no longer being surveilled by a foreign adversary; and for TikTok users, the app stays lit up. That to me seems very sensible.
If it’s not sold with a framework like I just described or some facsimile thereof, then you have to wonder: Is it even a business? Was it ever a business? I mean, why not sell something without the good stuff and get some money? It’s illogical.
FP: We’ve seen X CEO Elon Musk’s name come up this week as an interlocutor whom the Chinese might be willing to deal with. What do you think of that? Have you spoken to him?
FM: I haven’t had a conversation with him yet, but I’m open to that conversation.
This is very complicated for Musk because of his relationship with China and potential conflicts of interest. At the end of the day, we’re trying to solve a national security issue, right? That’s the fundamental problem that needs to be solved. But I would like to have a conversation with him about his thoughts on that.
The second point is I just think it’s noteworthy that for the first time, there was reporting that China and/or ByteDance may be open to a sale. So I think that’s interesting because that’s what we’ve been advocating for from the beginning.
We have two fundamental assumptions: One is that the U.S. government’s going to prevail and the legislation will be upheld. (Editor’s note: On Friday, the Supreme Court did in fact decide to uphold the law imposing the ban.) And two, at the end of the day, ByteDance will sell if it’s without the algorithm.
And now the big question is, what happens here? Does it get shut down? Does it get sold? Does it get shut down for a while and then sold? There will be twists and turns here, but we’re just watching carefully and very open-mindedly, speaking to anybody who would be interested.
We’re not going to turn our back on the principles and the mission of Project Liberty in order to buy TikTok.
In any negotiation, I think what will be clear is that ByteDance cannot continue to own TikTok in its current configuration. You never stray from your values and principles in a negotiation because you would be irrelevant very quickly if you did.
FP: This also isn’t just about TikTok. It’s become the symbol of U.S.-China tech competition, but there’s also a sense of whack-a-mole, with other Chinese apps still popular. How do you solve that?
FM: Now you’re talking about what Project Liberty is all about at its core. This is going to be never-ending. If we don’t address the fundamental technology and how it’s working, not only are we going to be playing whack-a-mole with China around the issues of cyberwarfare, but we’re watching Europe play whack-a-mole with American technology.
So what has been very helpful with this legislation that Congress passed, Project Liberty mounting the People’s Bid for TikTok, and all these other conversations that are going on is that people are becoming more aware of the fundamental set of issues. It comes down to the fact that people are vulnerable, that people no longer own themselves in this digital world. Because our virtual persona should be ours. It shouldn’t be owned by someone else, whether that someone else is in Silicon Valley or in Beijing.
We need to fix the internet and how it operates. This needs to be a human-centric internet that is doing all the wonderful things that technology allows but not at the expense of human rights and dignity.
It’s like using public money to build a massive interstate highway system and then letting a few companies decide how to control what happens on that highway system. Some charge tolls, some give free access, but there’s no rules—you can be any age, you can drink and drive, you can drive at any speed, you can drive backward, you can stop in the middle, you can do anything you want. Or you could have a set of rules: You need to be a certain age to drive, you have to take courses and be trained because a car is a weapon if not handled correctly. There are still going to be bad actors, there’s still going to be someone who doesn’t have a license who drives or speeds, and so you try to filter that out so other people aren’t harmed.
So there are the guardrails that get created both figuratively and literally, and then there’s the enforcement mechanism, and then most important of all there are societal norms and behaviors. It’s like your friend getting in the car if you’ve both had a few drinks and you say, “Let’s take an Uber.”
The internet has none of that. We need to fix it, and it can be fixed. It’s just engineering. And I’ve had hours of conversations with the visionaries who created the internet and created the World Wide Web. I know what they intended, I know what’s happening now is not what they intended, and that’s why they’re all helping. We just need to get ahead of this because otherwise we’ll be playing whack-a-mole until we run out of energy, resources, money, and interest. And then the whole thing will just become more of a mess.
We think somehow that either we can fix the tech and that’s going to fix all the problems or we can regulate the existing tech and that’s going to fix the problems. Sadly, neither will do. We need to go back to our core belief system, have technology that is in harmony with that, have regulations that are up to speed, because we live in a digital age now. There were different rules for horse-and-buggies than there were for Ferraris.
This TikTok issue has actually kind of elevated the conversation.
FP: Coming back to TikTok, ByteDance reportedly plans to shut down the app on Sunday rather than sell it. What do you think of that, and what would you say to convince it to sell?
FM: Look, China is going to do what China thinks is in its best interest. Having said that, I would love to see an outcome here that improves relationships, turns down the volume, removes some of the heat—I think there is a solution here that does that and where everybody can win. That’s the message we’ve delivered to ByteDance: We can create that proverbial win-win and move on, not escalate tensions between the countries. And let’s do that.
It’s a delicate situation, and I just hope it’s handled in a way where a solution like what Project Liberty has put forward is acceptable or a similar solution that somebody else puts forward. Because I don’t want to see this become a bigger problem.
