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Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday he is trying to buy TikTok as part of an investor group, adding intrigue to the complex political drive on Capitol Hill to strip ownership of the wildly popular app from its Chinese parent company.
Mr. Mnuchin, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said he understands the technology behind TikTok and “it’s a great business.”
“I’m going to put together a group to try and buy TikTok,” he said. “It should be owned by U.S. businesses.”
Mr. Mnuchin, a noted investor who now heads Liberty Strategic Capital, revealed his plans one day after the House passed a bipartisan bill that requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to either sell off its U.S. operation or cease to offer the app in the American market.
Lawmakers are concerned that China’s Communist government has too much access to the vast amount of user data the site collects, or that Beijing officials are dictating which content is pushed on the app to legions of young American TikTok users.
Mr. Mnuchin, a noted investor, said that when he served in the prior administration, he got President Trump to sign an order dictating that TikTok should be sold, a move that was fought by TikTok and its Chinese parent.
“I continue to believe that, so I think the legislation should pass,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
Now, the former secretary told CNBC he is cobbling together a team to purchase the app. He wouldn’t name his partners.
“I can’t tell that to you now, it would be a combination of investors,” Mr. Mnuchin said. “It would be no one investor that controlled this.”
Ironically, Mr. Trump — Mr. Mnuchin’s former boss — is walking back his get-tough stance on TikTok. He said forcing the sale of TikTok could lead to a ban that would benefit Meta’s Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, whom Mr. Trump dislikes, and harm young people who enjoy the app.
Yet critics of the former president suspect Mr. Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is motivated by a recent meeting with Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor who has a 15% stake in ByteDance. Mr. Trump claims TikTok did not come up during a February meeting he had with the donor.
President Biden, meanwhile, has urged the Senate to take up the House-passed bill and said he would sign it into law. Prospects for quick passage in the Senate, however, remain murky and TikTok has launched an aggressive campaign by its users to try to block a forced sale or ban.
China’s foreign ministry bristled at the House bill during a press conference on Thursday.
“It is sheer robbers’ logic to try every means to snatch from others all the good things that they have,” ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said. “How the U.S. has handled the TikTok incident enables the world to see clearly whether the U.S.’s so-called ‘rules’ and ‘order’ serve the whole world or the U.S. itself.”
When pressed by a reporter, Mr. Wenbin tried to distinguish the U.S. effort from China’s bans on websites like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
“We welcome foreign platforms and services of various kinds to the Chinese market on the premise that they observe China’s laws and regulations,” he said. “This is completely different from the U.S. way of handling TikTok, which is clearly a bullying act and robbers’ logic.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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