Potential TikTok bidder seeks a CEO, prepares business overhaul

U.S. billionaire businessman Frank McCourt is crafting a fundamental overhaul of TikTok’s business model to bid for it.

U.S. billionaire businessman Frank McCourt is crafting a fundamental overhaul of TikTok's business model as part of a plan to bid for the Chinese-owned short-form video app, he told Reuters.

McCourt, who formerly owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he has received verbal funding commitments totaling $20 billion from a consortium of investors to rescue the app from legal purgatory as it awaits a Supreme Court decision to determine if it will be forced to sell its U.S. operations.

His vision for TikTok includes revamping the company's advertising model so that users will have control over the ads and type of content they want to see. Over time, TikTok could earn revenue through ecommerce and licensing data for artificial intelligence training models - with users' consent - which will diminish the business' reliance on ads.

"When you give permission for your data to be used and you receive compensation, it's flipping this 180 degrees and giving the user the power," McCourt said this week.

The plan faces several hurdles, including TikTok's repeated assertions that it cannot be divested from its owner, Chinese tech firm ByteDance.

McCourt said the bid for TikTok would exclude the algorithm that determines the content that users see, in order to reduce complications for ByteDance. The Chinese government in 2020 added content recommendation algorithms to its export-control list, requiring a divestiture or sale of TikTok's algorithm to go through its administrative licensing procedures.

TikTok's appeal to the Supreme Court is a last-ditch effort to overturn a law signed by U.S. President Joe Biden that seeks to force a sale over national security concerns, or else the app will be banned on Jan. 19.