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TikTok isn’t for sale yet, but buyers are already lining up

One day after the U.S. House took a major step in banning TikTok unless it finds a new owner, a potential buyer has come into the picture.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said Thursday he is putting together an investor group that will try to purchase the China-owned app.

He told CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” “This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.”

On Wednesday, the House voted overwhelmingly (352-65) to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the video app. According to the bill, if ByteDance refused to sell, then TikTok would be banned from app stores provided by, for example, Apple and Google in the United States.

Lawmakers in favor of the bill are worried TikTok poses a national security threat. They fear the Chinese government could force ByteDance to hand over data that would compromise U.S. users. TikTok said it has not shared U.S. data with the Chinese government and would never do so.

There’s quite a bit that has to happen before the U.S. bill would go into effect. The Senate would have to pass the bill, and there’s no indication right now that they’ll even bring it to the floor. Then President Joe Biden would have to sign it. And that’s all assuming there are no legal challenges, which there almost certainly will be.

Details about Mnuchin’s plan are still a little foggy. He says he has spoken to a “bunch of people” about buying TikTok, but wasn’t any more specific than that. The price tag, should the company ever go up for sale, isn’t even known at this point. CNBC reported ByteDance was valued at $220 billion at its last funding round in 2023, according to PitchBook data. But if just the U.S. division of TikTok was sold, the price obviously would be much lower than $220 billion. The New York Times’ David McCabe reported that price could be worth more than $50 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “Already, U.S. tech and media titans are circling. In recent days, some executives have discussed buying TikTok if ByteDance agrees to sell. Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of videogame publisher Activision, has expressed interest to ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming, according to a person familiar with the situation. Any price tag is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

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