As Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley sit on the edge of their seats awaiting the fate of TikTok after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning it if wasn’t sold by Jan. 19, one Boston billionaire is eyeing an “incredibly serendipitous” opportunity to buy the app from owner ByteDance and reconfigure the inner workings of the internet.
Last week, after several months of public interest, Frank McCourt and a group of coinvestors, including Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary, sent ByteDance a formal offer to buy TikTok. Leading the bid is McCourt’s internet advocacy group Project Liberty. McCourt said he currently values TikTok—without its famed algorithm—at $20 billion. As of December 2023, the entirety of ByteDance’s global operations was estimated to be worth somewhere around $268 billion.
On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the bipartisan law that forces TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. operations by Jan. 19 or be banned because of national security concerns. At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office a day later, is mulling his options on how to stall a shutdown of the app, which seems imminent. Trump officials are reportedly drafting an executive order that would delay enforcement of a ban by either 60 or 90 days, according to the Washington Post.
However, owning the crown jewel of the internet’s youngest generations isn’t the endgame for McCourt. He has his gaze fixed on a broader goal: fundamentally altering how user data is handled on the internet. In technical terms, McCourt wants to build a decentralized version of the internet where individual users, rather than tech companies, own the reams of data spawned by their online lives. Users would then opt-in to having their data collected by certain companies, rather than having that be the norm, as it is on most websites and apps.
“The problem with our current Internet technology is that the data is being taken from us, scraped, stolen—call it what you will—as opposed to it being permissioned by the users, and it’s being taken from us through different surveillance devices,” McCourt told Fortune.
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