Shark Tank co-host Kevin O’Leary detailed the consequences of the United States’s possible TikTok ban, which President-elect Donald Trump could prevent within his first few days as president.
O’Leary, who has discussed buying TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, since last year, detailed how his motivation to “save” TikTok stems from how beneficial the platform is to small businesses. He has even met with the president-elect to discuss his bid to buy the platform. TikTok has considered making the app unusable for people in the U.S. beginning Sunday.
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Fellow billionaire Frank McCourt also expressed interest in purchasing the platform and was competing with O’Leary until recently, when the two “got together” to discuss the matter “for obvious reasons.”
“I’m well known within the Trump administration. We both have the same message: listen, we’re trying to save American businesses,” O’Leary said on Fox News’s Outnumbered. “We don’t care if they’re run by a Democrat or a Republican. This is 62% of job creation, small business in America. So we’re willing to work with anybody that we have to. But the order, the actual order, I’m the only guy you know that read the order. This is a complicated document!”
O’Leary also warned that this ban will affect social media platforms that “use Americans’s personal data in an adversarial fashion,” as some TikTok users are moving to other platforms ahead of the possible ban. Another platform that would be affected by the ban is Lemon8, which is also owned by ByteDance.
O’Leary assessed that the dilemma facing Trump on the ban stems from the U.S.’s failure to create an alternative platform for its citizens to use instead of TikTok. However, O’Leary said the U.S. could “shake it up and fix it all” to allow U.S. citizens to use the app without sharing their data.
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Trump has said he is “not opposed” to TikTok but is waiting to see what the Supreme Court says on the matter, with the justices expected to issue their decision “pretty soon.” Trump used TikTok during the 2024 election cycle to drum up support among younger voters but has not posted on the platform since Election Day.
Besides O’Leary and McCourt, YouTube personality MrBeast also expressed interest in buying TikTok, stating in a new video that “America deserves TikTok.” MrBeast is currently the most-followed YouTuber in the world, with over 344 million subscribers.
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