Investors eye TikTok sale after House vote
'Shark Tank' investor Kevin O'Leary tells 'The Story' he is ready to deal with the technical complexities of such a project.
O'Leary Ventures chief and "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary told Fox News on Thursday he remains interested in purchasing TikTok if a bill making its way through Congress effectively prohibiting Chinese ownership is passed into law.
O'Leary noted a handful of other potential suitors exist, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
He warned, however, that TikTok's Chinese proprietors will never sell their algorithm to American management, which means any U.S. buyer will have to consider the cost of essentially retaining the application's user base, ridding it of its nefarious data mining without changing its consumer-facing qualities.
"I think there'll be lots of competition… but we all face the same challenge," O'Leary told "The Story."
Kevin O'Leary (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty)
"We don't yet know how to deal with the fact that the database — the Texas Project, it's called — of American people, that is sitting in American servers. Oracle servers in Texas, that's fine, but the algorithms that make this work — they're not here in America, and they're never going to get here."
The ruling Chinese Communist Party enacted a law prohibiting companies like TikTok parent ByteDance from selling its proprietary technology, O'Leary said, meaning it will be hard to determine the actual full purchase cost stateside.
He noted the last major ownership transfer in the social media space was X, formerly known as Twitter, which he claimed lost tens of billions of dollars in market value after Elon Musk purchased it.
"[X] is still private. If you took it public today, you'd probably be down 60% because they also tried to change the algorithms on that." O'Leary said.
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"But here's the real problem: You have to sell this new code, this new company, this new American version to all of the users, the 5 million small businesses, all the advertisers, and that's where you have to choose your syndicate properly."
O'Leary said he has proven to be a good steward of such business activities: "So let the competition begin."
The Wednesday vote to pass Rep. Mike Gallagher's, R-Wis., "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" did not fall along party lines — finishing 352-65-1.
While Republicans remained largely cohesive in favor of the bill, 15 GOP members opposed it, including Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who warned it would be an unintended "Trojan horse" for executive power in terms of whether a president could decide what applications to ban based on his or her own belief of their purported foreign influence or control.
"This bill gives the president far too much authority to determine what Americans can see and do on the internet," Massie wrote Wednesday in a post on X.
Meanwhile, the bill's chief Democratic sponsor declared the legislation is "not a ban" in remarks to NBC News.
"What we're calling for is a divestment of TikTok by ByteDance, its owner, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party… I think what we're hearing is the president wants this authority to be able to balance the legitimate concerns of people on the platform who should continue to enjoy the platform with the legitimate national security concerns… " Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois said Tuesday.
One Democrat proponent also went so far as to declare "Trump was right" about TikTok's national security risks, as Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said Monday it was "rare for [him] to say" so.
Fox News' Kristen Altus contributed to this report.