“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary wants to buy TikTok with the help of investors willing to put down a stake in the Chinese-owned app.
O’Leary, a Canadian-born investor nicknamed “Mister Wonderful” for his skeptical character on the hit reality TV show, launched an online crowdfunding effort to gauge public interest in supporting “his goal of making TikTok an American-owned company.”
O’Leary said the move comes after U.S. law forced China-based ByteDance to sell its U.S. holdings and divest TikTok’s U.S.-based business. I posted my product on the StartEngine crowdfunding site The article was titled “Mr. Wonderful’s Plan to Acquire TikTok.”
O’Leary describes himself as a “celebrity entrepreneur” who is “known for his business acumen,” as evidenced by the sale of his software company, The Learning Company, for $3.8 billion.
The investor is not yet seeking funding. Instead, he is inviting potential investors to make reservations, which is a “non-binding” step and “no money will change hands.”
O’Leary plans to notify potential investors at a later date when the initial public offering will begin, allowing them to decide whether to commit money to the process.
According to StartEngine, the offer is a “Regulation A+ test-the-waters” offer, meaning it will be available to the general public.
In March, O’Leary Fox News reported that he would either buy TikTok or Or join a syndicate that is looking to buy it.
“It’s not going to be banned because I buy it,” O’Leary said. “Someone else will buy it, and it’s not Meta or Google, it’s because regulators will stop it.”
O’Leary said TikTok, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users worldwide and $16 billion in annual revenue in the United States, is “worth billions of dollars.”
“It’s one of the most successful advertising platforms on social media today,” O’Leary said. “All my companies use it. I buy it.”
O’Leary is the latest US-based businessman to express interest in buying TikTok.
Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of video game maker Activision Blizzard, is reportedly considering buying TikTok.
Earlier this year, Steve Mnuchin, who served as Treasury Secretary under then-President Donald Trump, said he was putting together a group of investors to buy TikTok.
In 2020, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison partnered with Walmart to try to buy a stake in TikTok’s US business.
But that effort failed after TikTok successfully challenged a Trump administration order requiring it to sell its U.S. operations to a U.S. company.
The Washington Post has reached out to TikTok for comment.
Reuters reported last month that TikTok’s China-based parent company wanted to shut down the app rather than sell it if all legal options to fight the recently enacted law were exhausted.
A source close to ByteDance told Reuters that the algorithms that TikTok uses to operate are considered core to the parent company’s entire operation, making a sale of the app highly unlikely.
Because TikTok accounts for a small percentage of ByteDance’s total revenue and daily active users, the parent company would prefer, in a worst-case scenario, to shut down the app in the United States rather than sell TikTok to a potential U.S. buyer, the company said.
The shutdown would have limited impact on ByteDance’s business and would not require the company to abandon its core algorithms, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
President Biden signed the bill giving ByteDance until January 19 to find a U.S.-based buyer.
Biden could extend the deadline by three months if he determines ByteDance has made progress in selling its U.S. business.
ByteDance does not disclose its financial performance or financial details of any of its divisions.
Another source said the company continues to make the majority of its revenue in China, mainly from other apps such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
ByteDance’s revenue in 2023 is expected to grow from $80 billion in 2022 to nearly $120 billion in 2023, according to two of the four sources.
TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. account for about 5% of ByteDance’s daily active users globally, one of the sources said.
TikTok shares the same core algorithm as Bytedance’s domestic apps, including short-video platform Douyin, according to three of the sources.
The company’s algorithms are considered superior to those of ByteDance’s rivals such as Tencent and Xiaohongshu, one of the people said.
According to sources, selling TikTok along with its algorithms would be impossible because TikTok’s intellectual property licenses are registered with ByteDance in China and would be difficult to separate from the parent company.
Moreover, separating TikTok’s algorithms from its U.S. assets would be an extremely complicated process, making ByteDance unlikely to explore that option, the people added.
With post wire
