After months of public statements of interest potential, Frank McCourt, his nonprofit Project Liberty, and a consortium of investors that includes ‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary submitted an official proposal to purchase TikTok to its parent company Bytedance on Thursday.
The formal offer came a day before the Supreme Court was set to hear arguments in a case brought by Bytedance about whether a law forcing the company to sell TikTok to a U.S. company should be allowed to go through. The group, which calls itself the People’s Bid for TikTok, aims to reform the social-media company by aligning it with McCourt’s long-held vision to restructure the internet’s infrastructure to collect less data on users.
“It would really catalyze this alternative internet,” McCourt told Fortune in an interview before the offer was publicly announced.
Project Liberty submitted its bid after securing financial backing for the deal, building out the tech stack it would need to power TikTok, and receiving a vote of confidence from government officials in both the Biden and incoming Trump administrations, who have been “encouraging” of the bid, Project Liberty president Tomicah Tilleman told Fortune.
“You put all of those pieces together and we feel that now is the right time to move forward with an offer,” Tilleman said.
To read the full article, visit the Fortune website here.