March 14 (UPI) — Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday he’s assembling a group of investors to buy TikTok as legislation to wrest the social media company from its Chinese ownership advanced in Congress.
Mnuchin, who headed the Treasury under former President Donald Trump, announced the plans in an interview with CNBC’s SquawkBox.
“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Mnuchin wrote on X. “The issue is all about the technology. This needs to be controlled by U.S. businesses.”
Mnuchin runs Liberty Strategic Capital. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund is both an investor in TikTok owner ByteDance and is a limited partner in Liberty Strategic Capital.
While the House has overwhelmingly passed the bill that would force TikTok to be sold, the future of that bill in the Senate is unclear. Also unknown is whether China would allow the sale.
A joint statement from the chair and ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said they were concerned about TikTok’s national security threat indicating bipartisan support in the Senate to take up the TikTok bill.
But Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has not yet publicly committed to taking it up.
TikTok opposes the sale and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the United States of using “robber’s logic” in the effort to force TikTok’s divestiture from its Chinese parent company.
China’s commerce ministry said the U.S. should stop “unfairly suppressing foreign companies.”
The motive behind the legislative attempt to force TikTok’s sale is a concern over national security because data collected by TikTok could be accessed by the Chinese government.
While in office, Trump issued an executive order that tried to require ByteDance to divest TikTok, but a court overturned it.
Trump, who opposed the House bill, confirmed a meeting with GOP donor Jeffrey Yass, who is a major ByteDance investor. But Trump said the TikTok issue was not discussed.
President Joe Biden has said that if Congress passes it he will sign the bill forcing TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company or be banned in the U.S.
