Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Thursday that he wants to assemble a group of investors to buy the social network TikTok, as the US Congress could force the Chinese parent company ByteDance to enter a forced sale AFP and Reuters.

Steven MnuchinPhoto: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Profimedia

“I believe that the law should be passed, and I believe that (TikTok) should be sold,” Steve Mnuchin said on Thursday on the air of the American channel CNBC, quoted by Agerpres.

“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” “because it has to be controlled by American interests,” he added.

“I’ve talked to a number of people” about the project, Mnuchin said, declining to name names.

Steven Mnuchin was the head of the US Treasury in the Trump administration (2017-2021), and before that he was the vice president of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a text that, if it receives a positive vote in the Senate and is released by President Joe Biden, ByteDance will be forced to sell TikTok under the threat of a ban on the social network in the United States.

ByteDance will have six months to sell shares of the platform with 170 million US users.

So far, no potential buyer has officially come forward.

After leaving government, Mnuchin started an investment fund with a particular interest in the technology sector

However, The Wall Street Journal reported that former CEO of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, has expressed interest in addition to ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming.

The value of TikTok is difficult to estimate, especially in the event of a forced sale. In 2020, ByteDance set its price tag at $60 billion as Donald Trump’s administration sought to force it to divest, Bloomberg reported.

After leaving the government, Mnuchin founded Liberty Strategic Capital, an investment fund with a particular interest in the technology sector.

It quickly raised $2.5 billion from investors, some of which came from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, according to the New York Times.

When he entered government in 2017, Mnuchin had a fortune that several American media outlets estimated at around $400 million.

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