Steve Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury during the Trump administration, is reportedly recruiting an investor group to buy social media platform TikTok.
“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” the former Goldman Sachs analyst told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
Mnuchin leads Liberty Strategic Capital, an acquisition firm that boasts Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund as a limited partner. SoftBank invested in ByteDance, the Chinese-based parent company of TikTok, in 2018. Mnuchin has been a critic of TikTok since 2020: during the Trump years, Mnuchin reportedly found himself in the faction of the White House that wanted to make ByteDance sell the app. The other camp, led by former Director of the National Trade Council Peter Navarro, wanted to completely ban it.
“This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.
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Rumble has also made an offer to be part of the “consortium with other parties” looking to buy and operate TikTok. Specifically, they offered to serve as TikTok’s new data storage center using their recently announced Rumble Cloud system. They promised the data would both be kept inside the United States, and that their infrastructure would remain independent, neutral, and dedicated to “the free and open internet.”
The popular video-based social media platform is facing a total ban in the United States if ByteDance does not sell it to another vendor. While the House of Representatives has passed the bill to bring this about, the Senate has yet to vote on it. The lawmakers are citing the ability of the Chinese government to harvest user data as a national security concern.
Ultimately, President Joe Biden will have to sign it into law. So far, he has spoken positively about the legislation and has signaled he will support it.
Some critics have argued the bill contains language that would permit the US government to ban any website or app if they could make a case that a foreign adversary is in control of it. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the bill “a Trojan Horse.”
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is now against the effort to ban TikTok. In a Truth Social post, he wrote: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business … I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in last election, doing better … They are a true enemy of the people.”
This new position of the former president’s arose after a meeting between Trump and libertarian billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian investor who owns a stake in TikTok worth roughly $30 billion. Yass has been instrumental in supporting the opposition to a TikTok ban in Washington.
TikTok asked its users to complain to their representatives about the ban, claiming it would “damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience.”
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).
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