Steven Mnuchin, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, shared on Thursday that he’s collecting a group of investor to potentially purchase video sharing platform TikTok. This follows the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill Wednesday that requires the Chinese-owned social media company to sell to a U.S. operator or be banned in America.
“It’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” said Mnuchin, noting that although it probably isn’t profitable, “it’s worth a lot of money.”
However, the Chinese government may not allow ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to be purchased because of a variety of measures it began to put in place in 2020. Officials have marked TikTok as a sensitive technology and said they would oppose any sale to a foreign owner.
Dan Ives, senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, says he doesn’t believe that ByteDance would sell TikTok with its source code, and without it, “this would be like buying an F1 car without the engine. It would be illogical.”
