Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday he’s assembling a team of investors to make a bid to buy TikTok.
This comes a day after the House passed a measure to ban the Chinese-owned social media giant or force a sale to a US-operated owner.
“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Mnuchin told CNBC Thursday morning. Even though TikTok is likely unprofitable, “it’s worth a lot of money,” he added.
Mnuchin said he would give existing US investors the option to roll over their stakes in TikTok but stressed that no entity would have more than 10% control. But he declined to name any individuals on the team he’s putting together.
“There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” he said.
But ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, may never be allowed to be sold to any company outside of China because of measures the government began putting into place in 2020. The Chinese government deems TikTok a sensitive technology and officials have said they’d oppose any forced sale that would involve exporting it into the hands of a foreign owner.
Thursday’s TikTok news comes just one week after Mnuchin led a $1 billion lifeline rescue of embattled regional lender New York Community Bank.
Mnuchin and TikTok didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s requests for comment.