Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary is offering $20 billion in cash to buy communist China’s social media platform TikTok.
During an interview Friday on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom, O’Leary said, “Right now, $20 billion’s on the table. Cash.”
O’Leary said in March that he or another American would buy TikTok to keep it from being shut down, per Breitbart News.
He stated at the time, “It [is] not going to get banned. I’m going to buy it. Somebody will buy it. It won’t be Meta and Google. A regulator will stop that. A syndicate will be formed. I’d like to be involved obviously. What I would do is form a bipartisan committee, an advisory committee for 18 months. Go to them and say to them, how much will you let me keep of the Chinese?”
There have been strong opinions regarding a potential ban of TikTok as users, who are mostly teenagers and young adults, do not want access interrupted or restricted, Breitbart News reported on Wednesday.
O’Leary’s recent $20 billion offer comes after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law requiring the company to find a buyer or face being banned, the Fox report continued:
In its decision, the Supreme Court backed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a law passed by Congress last April with wide bipartisan support. The law gave TikTok nine months to either divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or be removed from U.S.-based app stores and hosting services.
Congress has voiced concerns about how the app could be used as a weapon or a way to gather massive amounts of data from users.
“TikTok, ByteDance and several users of the app swiftly sued to block the ban in May, arguing the legislation would suppress free speech for the millions of Americans who use the platform,” the Fox article reads.
“After a lower court upheld the ban, the Supreme Court agreed to hear TikTok’s emergency request to either block or pause implementation of the law under a fast-track timeline just nine days before the ban was slated to go into effect,” it said.
TikTok will “go dark” when the clock strikes midnight on Sunday unless a deal is made to keep it going, O’Leary said.
Meanwhile, TikTok users are reportedly shifting over to another app called Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book” as the ban looms, Breitbart News reported on Friday.
“Xiaohongshu, which Chinese media is referring to as ‘RedNote’ in an apparent bid to distance it from its Mandarin name – is also controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and is named after all-time murder champion Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’ of communism,” the article said.
