The People’s Bid to Purchase TikTok: Real Estate Founder Frank McCourt Reveals a Deal for a Privacy-Preserving Internet
The court has left TikTok with few options for survival. There is a chance that Donald Trump could save the platform come January, something he promised to do on the campaign trail. But beyond winning a final legal appeal at the Supreme Court, which is far from guaranteed, finding a wealthy buyer in the US may be TikTok’s most viable option.
Frank was talking to me about his bid to buy TikTok. It was a good time to check in after the events of the previous week. I got an insight into how creators are preparing for a future without TikTok.
In our conversation, McCourt stated that a sale would make everyone happy. In order to scale his vision for a more privacy-friendly internet that competes with companies like Meta and Google, McCourt has offered the app’s brand, user base, and existing content for $20 billion. He doesn’t “need or want” the algorithm running TikTok’s For You page, he says.
Project Liberty was asked if it could maintain the original user base without the beloved algorithm. McCourt said, people don’t know what they don’t have until you show them.
WIRED spoke with McCourt earlier this week about what else he would do with the app, including keeping some form of advertising (“People, in America in particular, like to buy things,” he says) and letting people curate their own recommendation algorithm (“It’s a much better model”).
One of the most prominent prospective buyers to emerge so far is real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Frank McCourt, who says he has received $20 billion in informal commitments from investors to purchase the app as part of what he calls the “people’s bid.” The sale would bolster McCourt’s existing technology initiative Project Liberty and the so-called decentralized social networking protocol it has developed. McCourt wants to incorporate the DSNP into TikTok and allow users to export their friends across other interoperable apps.