The billionaire Frank McCourt is launching a “people’s bid” to buy the app, replace its addictive algorithm, and give users greater control of their data. Is it a publicity stunt or a sincere attempt to reform the digital age?
Illustration by Erik Carter
On a chilly morning in December, I pulled up the curving stone driveway of a hundred-and-twenty-acre oceanfront estate on Cape Cod. Frank McCourt—not the acclaimed dead Irish American writer, but the Boston-born billionaire real-estate magnate—bought the property twenty-five years ago, not long before he purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch. “I had an awesome life in L.A.,” he told me. “Every boy’s dream—own his own team, et cetera, et cetera. Everything was fabulous.”
In 2009, McCourt and his wife, Jamie, who was then the Dodgers’ C.E.O., separated, setting off years of sensational stories about the couple’s free-flowing personal spending and their supposed mismanagement of the Dodgers. (Among other things, they had reportedly hired a Russian healer to send good energy to the players.) During divorce proceedings, which resulted in a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar settlement, the club went into bankruptcy. McCourt eventually sold the team for more than two billion dollars. Online, fans and the press were brutal; McCourt still inspires derision on Dodgers subreddits. “I saw how social media can be weaponized to attack anyone and discredit them and malign them,” McCourt said. “It’s very much like your house is burning down, and you have a garden hose with low water pressure to put out the fire while other people are pouring five-gallon cans of gasoline on it.”
McCourt calls his divorce his “big-bang moment,” the end of one life and the beginning of another. “The pain that my four sons endured,” he has written, inspired him to find a way “to help fix the toxic system that exacerbated it.” He has since given hundreds of millions of dollars to causes that promise to help restore humanity to the Internet. Most notably, in 2021, he created Project Liberty, a five-hundred-million-dollar initiative to fund academic research, develop new technologies, and connect those “committed to a people-powered Internet.” Its biggest release thus far is a protocol—the rules that devices use to communicate with one another—which is freely available and which promises to give users more autonomy over their online identities and experiences.
At seventy-one, McCourt is stringently thin and energetic, with close-cropped white hair and sharp features. At his home on the Cape, a sprawling brown-shingled Colonial, he was dressed in dark tones and Chelsea boots, though no outside shoes were allowed inside; I was offered a pair of monogrammed slippers by a staff member before McCourt escorted me to his study. He now has four young children with his second wife. Their children’s Internet access, McCourt told me, is heavily restricted. “I happen to be familiar, having a lot of children, with kids and their needs and how they grow up, and how they’re influenced.” This summer, he said, when his nine-year-old daughter went away to summer camp in Switzerland, she was given a smartphone with throttled Internet access.
Last spring, while McCourt was promoting his book, “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age,” in which he writes that big tech companies have “learned how to tap into our most basic instincts” and “exert untold influence over us,” President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok, the famously addictive app with more than a billion active users worldwide, or force a sale of its U.S. operations to an American buyer by January 19th. McCourt saw an opportunity. That May, he announced that he was mounting his own “people’s bid” to buy the app. “I’m not looking to buy TikTok and replicate the tech stack,” he told me. “You know, scrape people’s data, exploit it, so forth.” Instead, he wants to use it to further his goal of building an Internet where users, rather than Big Tech, own their data. “The TikTok bid is just an incredibly fortuitous moment and opportunity,” he said, “where people are aligned, seeing the damage being caused by TikTok to our national security and to kids.”
McCourt’s family made its fortune doing construction in Boston—they poured pavement at Logan Airport and for the Big Dig—and his understanding of how to fix things is often to think of the problem as one big infrastructure project: in the case of the Internet, the pipes are irreparably broken and need replacing. Users have grown accustomed to giving away more and more of their personal data to big tech companies—a billion little frogs clicking “Accept Terms” and slowly boiling in a putrid stew—in exchange for using social networks and browsing online. When McCourt speaks on the subject, he tends to use the term “digital personhood” to describe the erosion of online autonomy. “We’re talking about something that can control our free will, something that impacts, literally, how our brain forms,” he said. “When I went to school, I was taught that free will is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species; our ability to choose, to make decisions, agency, autonomy—it’s being taken away from us.”
Data security is at the center of TikTok’s ban in the U.S. Its parent company, ByteDance, is headquartered in Beijing, and there has long been concern that TikTok user data could be accessible to the Chinese government. As part of a wrongful dismissal suit, a former ByteDance executive has claimed that, during his tenure, members of the Chinese Communist Party had access to U.S. user data and “guided how the company advanced core Communist values.” (At the time, Bytedance told the New York Times that it would “vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations.”) In 2022, ByteDance acknowledged that its employees had accessed the user data of U.S. journalists, tracking their locations in an attempt to identify the sources of leaked information. (“The misconduct of these individuals, who are no longer employed at ByteDance, was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data,” a company spokesperson said.)
For McCourt, TikTok is simply an extreme example of most Internet business models: companies are incentivized to make their products as addictive as possible to keep users on their apps and to sell their data and attention to advertisers. TikTok is perhaps a case of that model being used to disseminate propaganda. McCourt cited research from a group called the Network Contagion Research Institute that purported to show exaggerated biases on TikTok compared with social-media sites like Instagram and Twitter. “There seemed to be a preponderance of pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas perspective on TikTok versus pro-Israeli or pro-Israel,” McCourt said. “Then they looked at a range of issues: Tiananmen, Hong Kong, Uyghurs, Kashmir.” In every case, he said, the researchers had found an amplification of pro-China stances on TikTok. (Some observers have questioned the methodology used in the study.)
The idea of a “people’s bid” speaks more to the potential beneficiaries of a Project Liberty-owned TikTok; this would not be a small-dollar donation deal. McCourt has the backing of TD Securities, which would provide debt financing, and he says that he has promises of twenty billion dollars—what he and his advisers believe the company is worth without its algorithm—from a range of institutional investors. The possibility remains that the Chinese government may not allow TikTok to be sold at all, but McCourt believes that his bid would satisfy the Chinese government’s likely parameters—no algorithm—and would most “crisply” meet the U.S. government’s set of national-security concerns, with Project Liberty’s “clean, made-in-America tech stack.” If his effort is successful, he said, it would represent a significant step toward building a “public digital infrastructure,” an alternative to the corporate Internet that has grown around us. “What’s important is that we have a different Internet that’s human-centric,” he said. “TikTok is a vehicle to do that.”
TikTok was first released in 2016 as the global version of the Chinese app Douyin, and gained popularity in the U.S. around 2018, after merging with the lip-synching app Musical.ly. During the first few months of 2020, the app was downloaded three hundred and fifteen million times; by the following September, it had a billion active users. Its proprietary algorithm promotes endless scrolling by tracking not only users’ likes and comments but also their over-all browsing behavior, including how long they spend watching certain videos. It has become particularly popular with young people. According to the Pew Research Center, six in ten American teen-agers report using the app daily, with sixteen per cent saying that they are on it almost constantly. It has also increasingly become a source of news, which, on the app, is content as likely to have been created by an influencer as by a mainstream outlet. Thirty-nine per cent of users under thirty told Pew that they regularly got their news from the app.
In 2020, to ease concerns about the manipulation of American data, ByteDance entered talks with the U.S. government. The company agreed to store the data of American users on Oracle servers in Austin, Texas, an endeavor that became known as Project Texas. But lawmakers remained wary. In March, 2023, TikTok’s C.E.O., Shou Chew, testified for more than five hours before Congress, receiving a bipartisan bludgeoning over the harms the app may be inflicting on children. Frank Pallone, a Democratic House member from New Jersey, was among the lawmakers who brought up research that found TikTok’s algorithm recommends “videos to teens that create and exacerbate feelings of emotional distress, including videos promoting suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders.” (China, for its part, has taken drastic measures to crack down on children’s Internet usage: in 2021, the country banned mobile phones in schools and made Douyin inaccessible to users under the age of fourteen between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M.)
Following a March, 2024, national-security briefing on TikTok, which remains classified, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said that the app was “a gun aimed at Americans’ heads” and that “the Chinese Communists are weaponizing information that they are constantly, surreptitiously collecting from a hundred and seventy million Americans.” Senator Mark Warner, then the Democratic chair of the Intelligence Committee, worried that a Chinese company had “that much potential to manipulate content on a platform that a lot of young people look to as their No. 1 news source.” In early March, TikTok had pushed messages to its users warning of the ban and urging them to contact their representatives; congressional offices were flooded with calls, some of them threatening, and some of them from young people who said that they would harm themselves if the ban went into effect. Nevertheless, in April, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was signed into law, giving TikTok until January, 2025, to find a new owner or be banned from the U.S.
TikTok promptly sued the government, arguing that the law violated the free speech of American users. In December, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the company, essentially finding that the national-security threat of TikTok, as determined by Congress, outweighed any free-speech concerns. A week and a half later, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear TikTok’s appeal on January 10th, just nine days before the law is slated to go into effect and ten days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During oral arguments, the Justices seemed sympathetic to the government’s case. Brett Kavanaugh brought up the potentially compromised data of “tens of millions of Americans, including teen-agers, people in their twenties,” that the Chinese could use to “develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people—people who, a generation from now, will be working in the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. or in the State Department.” A week later, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, which means that, on January 19th, TikTok will be removed from app stores, and the company is reportedly planning to make the app inaccessible to U.S. users, directing them instead to a Web site with information about the ban. What happens next will depend, in large part, on the incoming Administration.
Trump’s views on TikTok have shifted radically over the years. In 2020, he signed an executive order that aimed to ban the app, but a federal court, calling the move “arbitrary and capricious,” blocked it. Last summer, he joined the app himself, where he now has nearly fifteen million followers. On the campaign trail, he promised to “save” TikTok, a shift that seemed to reflect the influence of Jeff Yass, one of the G.O.P.’s top donors, who gave ninety-six million dollars to conservative causes during the 2024 election cycle. Yass owns a significant stake in ByteDance through his firm, Susquehanna International Group. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, was paid by the conservative Club for Growth to advocate for TikTok; last spring, before the ban passed, she met with multiple lawmakers to plead the company’s case on Capitol Hill. (Yass gave nineteen million dollars to the Club for Growth in 2024.) Tony Sayegh, the head of Susquehanna’s public-affairs department and a former Trump Administration official, is reportedly close to Donald Trump, Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump, and has been pushing TikTok’s point of view behind the scenes with the Trump family. (In March, 2023, TikTok also hired former Obama advisers David Plouffe and Jim Messina.)
During the transition period, Trump has seemed to signal that he might encourage a divestment of TikTok to a U.S. buyer. Just after Christmas, he submitted an unusual amicus brief to the Supreme Court, asking its members to delay the ban and touting the President-elect’s negotiation skills: “President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.” Earlier in the month, he had met with Chew, the app’s C.E.O., and invited SoftBank Group’s Masayoshi Son—who owns a stake in ByteDance—to speak at a press conference, where Son pledged to inject a hundred billion dollars into the U.S. economy. Chew has since reportedly reached out to Elon Musk for advice. On January 13th, Bloomberg reported that Chinese officials were considering whether the Musk-owned X could take over TikTok’s U.S. operations. A ByteDance spokesperson told the outlet that the report was “pure fiction,” though the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have since published similar stories. In the meantime, Chew is expected to attend Trump’s Inauguration on January 20th, a day after the TikTok ban goes into effect.
Estimates of what a divested version of TikTok might cost with its proprietary algorithm are as high as two hundred billion dollars. (It’s unclear if TikTok would sell the company with its algorithm; its user base, brand name, and content are also potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.) The steep price tag narrows the pool of buyers to a handful of tech companies and billionaires. In 2020, as a result of Trump’s first-term executive order, TikTok approached Microsoft to discuss a possible sale. The company was interested, though its C.E.O., Satya Nadella, later called the talks “the strangest thing I’ve ever sort of worked on” because the U.S. government, which had pushed for the company’s sale, “just disappeared.” In the end, it was Oracle, led by its chairman, Larry Ellison, and its C.E.O., Safra Catz, both Trump allies, that won approval for a deal, which formed the basis for the app’s Project Texas initiative; Oracle would become the U.S. host for TikTok’s data. Notably, the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling in December appeared to reject the idea that Project Texas had shielded U.S. users from the Chinese government. “Even when TikTok’s voluntary mitigation measures have been fully implemented, the ‘source code supporting the TikTok platform, including the recommendation engine, will continue to be developed and maintained by ByteDance subsidiary employees, including in the United States and in China,’ ” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote.
When the law banning TikTok passed last spring, interested bidders began to crop up again. The former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who had helped review the Oracle deal, said that he was looking to put together a team of buyers. Kevin O’Leary, an investor and one of the stars of “Shark Tank”— where he goes by “Mr. Wonderful”—posted on a crowdfunding site that he wanted to mount a bid. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Bobby Kotick, the former C.E.O. of the video-gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard, was interested, too—he has extensive business relationships in China, including with ByteDance’s former C.E.O. Kotick, for his part, told me that he thinks Musk would be “a very good owner of TikTok” and his involvement “makes good business sense,” in part because of the national-security interests of his existing businesses. Musk’s companies hold billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts and an estimated half of Tesla’s electric vehicles originate in the company’s Shanghai plant, meaning that the Chinese government might feel that it has some reassuring leverage over him.
McCourt, who says that he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s C.E.O., is unique among the group of potential buyers. For starters, he has been steadfastly public, voicing his desire to purchase the app in print and televised interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” reportedly Trump’s favorite show. He is also the only potential buyer so far promising to serve the public’s interest—to address not only geopolitical concerns about the app but also the deleterious effects it has been shown to have on young users. But there are skeptics of the viability of a “people’s bid.” According to Adam Kovacevich, a Democratic tech lobbyist, “the hurdles to Project Liberty acquiring TikTok are vast.” Even if China allows a sale to go through, Project Liberty would be competing with a list of potential buyers that could include the likes of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Musk’s X. “I think it’s been kind of an opportunistic way to get visibility for their original mission of healthier social media,” Kovacevich said of Project Liberty. But, he added, “a nonprofit is going to get outbid.”
In November, just a couple of weeks after Trump’s victory, Project Liberty kicked off “The Summit on the Future of the Internet” at the McCourt School of Public Policy, which McCourt endowed at Georgetown University, his alma mater. The event was an example of McCourt’s billionaire connective power, gathering those with common interests who don’t often encounter one another face to face: four hundred attendees including politicians such as Amy Klobuchar, Ro Khanna, and Nancy Mace; technologists such as Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, and the Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin; TikTok creators; think tankers; and grieving parents. Brandon Guffey, a Republican representative in the South Carolina legislature, whose teen-age son killed himself after falling prey to a sexual-extortion scheme on Instagram, was seated a few feet away from me during the opening remarks. McCourt roamed the stage in a dark knit crewneck and jeans, a tiny headset affixed to his ear. “You’re going to hear the word ‘data’ mentioned over and over and over again,” he said. “Every time you hear it, I’m asking you to think ‘personhood.’ Your data is you in the digital age. Don’t you want to own you?”
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. The idea is to create “interoperability,” which, in theory, would give users greater agency; if they don’t like the tone or content moderation on one site, they could move to another relatively seamlessly, without losing followers. The term “fediverse” is often applied to the corpus of sites, including Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, that use decentralized, interoperable systems. Bluesky, though not technically in the fediverse—it doesn’t use the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse sites do—is a spiritual cousin and can be easily connected to the fediverse with services such as Bridgy Fed. Project Liberty suggests that its own contribution to the decentralized Internet, the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, or D.S.N.P., could be used in ridesharing apps and on social media to enable creators “to manage their identity” and “avoid being deplatformed.”
Thus far, only the social-media site MeWe has fully adopted Project Liberty’s D.S.N.P., having migrated about 1.5 million users onto it; Bluesky currently has more than twenty-seven million users. “D.S.N.P. has a reputation as vaporware,” one technologist, who wanted to remain anonymous because they had received funding from Project Liberty, told me. The primary reason that McCourt wants to buy TikTok is to acquire its user base and port its members and their data over to Project Liberty’s decentralized protocol; he insists that he has no need for the app’s algorithm. “I have zero interest in maintaining a version of TikTok that’s just replicating the algorithm and scraping people’s data,” McCourt told me. His version of the app would help “stand up an alternative Internet, and then other people would have to move in this direction, because that’s what the marketplace wants.”
But the details of what a Project Liberty-owned version of TikTok might actually look like are scant. “The transition to this new infrastructure would be designed to minimize interruption for TikTokers,” a recent press release from the group promised, though the experience of the app would undoubtedly change without its algorithm. This, to some in the industry, seems like a backward approach to fixing the problems of social media. “McCourt seems to be saying, ‘Let’s use my money to acquire users,’ ” the technologist said. “Bluesky said, ‘We’ll just build the product, we’ll build the Twitter replacement, and when people need to leave, they will come here.’ ” (When I asked McCourt about this line of criticism, he said, “First of all, I haven’t parachuted in. I’ve been working on this for more than ten years. And, secondly, if they don’t agree or appreciate it, they just shouldn’t engage in it.”)
I asked Graber, the Bluesky C.E.O., about Project Liberty’s pitch. “I think everybody who’s in the interoperability conversation is, like, ‘Well, you should use my protocol, and then we’ll be interoperable with everyone,’ ” she said. “D.S.N.P. is very opinionated. It specifies a way that you do data, a way that you do identity. I have concerns about its scalability. But if you want to test it, go right ahead. We’re not a blocker to that.” Still, she shared some of the concerns about D.S.N.P.’s adoption strategy. “I tend to approach things from, like, ‘Where is adoption?’ and ‘What is a pragmatic approach to do things?’ ” Graber told me. “Trying to set a protocol standard for everybody before there’s wide adoption means that you might also get it wrong in terms of what you’re standardizing around.”
When it came to TikTok, Graber seemed most interested in the fate of the company’s algorithm. “A huge amount of the controversy is driven by how the algorithm works and the fact that there’s only one algorithm, and it can be quite addictive,” she said. Bluesky allows users to tailor their own social-media algorithms. Similarly, a divested, U.S.-owned TikTok might not have the same kind of novel, surprising content as the current version, but it could allow users to more freely choose what sort of content they wanted to see. People could opt in to a cute-animal algorithm, for instance, or one that pushed beauty tips. “I think opening up algorithms to a marketplace of algorithms is a really healthy intervention to make,” Graber told me. “Just make it really easy for most users, give them the ability to choose, and then make sure that the data is open.”
Project Liberty was using the summit to launch another tech initiative, what the group calls Log in with Liberty, a way to browse the Internet as a data-autonomous individual, without having to turn over personal information. On the second day of the conference, Braxton Woodham, a co-creator of Project Liberty’s D.S.N.P. protocol, played me a brief video about how the new service would work. “Imagine a singular online identity that belongs to you, one where you control how other companies interact with your data, where you own your connections and content across applications,” a voice-over intoned, showing a woman posting about her trip to Miami on two separate social-media platforms. “Join us on the People’s Internet and log in with Liberty.” The video ended, but I remained unclear about what “logging in with Liberty” entailed. Woodham, a rocket scientist by training, who was formerly the chief technology officer at Fandango, recalled how Facebook and Google have tried to get users to log in to various sites using proprietary accounts. Project Liberty wanted to provide a non-corporate alternative to this sort of log-in. An acquisition of TikTok would give the group millions of users to offer this option to.
Log in with Liberty, Woodham went on, may ultimately resemble something like the Energy Star logo on household appliances, which indicates energy-efficient products. Most consumers don’t know what the Energy Star label means, exactly, but they like their appliances to have it. “We look at the consumer-level change more that way,” Woodham said. “It’s not a revelatory feature.” It was more about gradually changing expectations.
At the Cape, McCourt was eager to show me the full extent of his property. We hopped onto a golf cart and drove down from the main house, across the street, and into a wooded preserve filled with tall pines, where McCourt, a self-professed “stone head”—as in, he loves granite—has erected a series of stone installations of his own design. One piece, a sphere that appears to float when summer ferns grow around it, was completed in 2019, shortly after the death of his mother, at the age of a hundred and two, and the birth of one of his sons. The period seemed to crack something open in McCourt. It was the same year he started planning Project Liberty. “I don’t know whether it was having the confidence or the maturity, or the ability to express myself in a way that spoke to the journey that I felt that I was on,” he told me.
We drove to a small hill nestled in the woods. McCourt stopped by a stone wall with a poem that he’d written etched on it. “It’s about seeing what you didn’t see before,” he said. “It was there, but you didn’t see it.” People always seem to be in motion, he said, restless but perhaps not “listening and observing and really absorbing.” We walked down a small slope, past a dry-stacked wall, and into a Zen garden with a lily pond. He directed me to pose for a picture under the willow arch where, he told me, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web—and a supporter of Project Liberty—had also stood.
As we walked out of the gardens, I asked McCourt whether Project Liberty was, in part, an act of penance for previous missteps. Not penance, he told me. But he does think of his work through the lens of magnanimity, the concept that Thomas Aquinas and later Ignatius of Loyola popularized. “It’s the idea of doing whatever is necessary,” he said. “So, if it’s necessary to be subordinate and wash the feet of another, that’s what you do. If it’s necessary to do something very bold, that’s what you do.” I found myself imagining what Aquinas might have thought of a TikTok bid.
At the Project Liberty summit, McCourt had seemed concerned that his broader Internet project was being subsumed by buzz around the app’s sale. “The way the media works is it focusses on the issue of the moment,” he said. “And that’s both good and bad.” The speculation surrounding TikTok, he acknowledged, had “elevated” the profile of Project Liberty. But on the Cape he seemed as uncertain as everyone else about what might happen to the app after January 19th. “I do think it’s going to be sold,” McCourt said, as he drove the golf cart through an immense expanse of lawn. “Now play that out—is it an insider-type deal and nothing changes except the ownership? Or is it, you know, not an insider deal and everything changes, because it’s an opportunity to start fixing the Internet, not just fix TikTok?”
McCourt’s political donations have largely been to Democratic candidates, but he has remained optimistic about the incoming Administration. Some of Project Liberty’s tech projects rely on blockchain to allow users to move and control their online identity from site to site. During the campaign, Trump promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” “I think with Trump, projects like this have just gotten a huge, huge boost because of his belief in blockchain,” McCourt told me. “That’s way bigger for this project than TikTok.” (Later, he told me that the Musk rumor was noteworthy because it was the first public indication that the Chinese might be open to a sale.)
The new law gives the President some discretion over what constitutes a “qualified divestiture.” There has been speculation that Trump might be inclined to come up with a fix that allows ByteDance to keep a stake in TikTok while adding an American partner—an updated version of Project Texas. In such a scenario, Oracle could have an advantage given that the company already hosts the app’s data in the U.S. Kevin O’Leary, the “Shark Tank” star, recently joined McCourt’s bid and has helped make overtures to Trump; in January, during an appearance on Fox News, he said that he’d met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to discuss TikTok’s sale. “I wanted to let him know, as well as others in his Cabinet, that we’re doing this, and we’re going to need their help,” O’Leary said.
Back at the house, as McCourt and I sat for a lunch of clam chowder and salad, I asked whether he had spoken to Jeff Yass, whose Susquehanna International Group is seen as a key ByteDance investor. They hadn’t connected yet, though McCourt said that he has spoken with representatives of most of the current stakeholders in the company, which include KKR, General Atlantic, and Coatue Management. Afsaneh Beschloss, an economist and investor, is a friend of McCourt’s and gave a toast at the Project Liberty summit; she serves on the board of directors of the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, which also owns a stake in ByteDance.
McCourt’s pitch tries to encompass not just his idealistic vision for the Internet but pragmatic capitalist arguments. “There’s a national-security issue, for sure, but beyond that, this is a new harm to young people and, quite frankly, just not good for America,” he said. “When you have people getting their news primarily or exclusively from TikTok, and the news they’re getting is not news—that’s dangerous for not just democracy but capitalism as well.” What was one thriving capitalist society that’s not a democracy? McCourt asked.
China? I ventured.
McCourt brushed off the suggestion as outside the parameters of true capitalism.
In the end, McCourt’s long-shot TikTok pitch is essentially a reputational one, and perhaps a quaint one at that: Do investors want to be a part of a company that is seen as a sinister force? A Project Liberty-led TikTok acquisition would allow them to salvage their money and slap a feel-good story on top. “Technology itself is fantastic,” McCourt told me. “The Internet—fantastic possibilities. Big Data? Great.” The question, he went on, is “what do we optimize all this for? If it’s just the technology and the machinery, then we’re going to be regressing socially. If it’s actually designed to optimize for us as human beings, my little kids are going to live till one hundred and fifty years old.” After a pause, he added, “It’s gonna be fantastic.” ♦
