(Bloomberg) — Steven Mnuchin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, said he was still interested in buying TikTok’s U.S. business from its Chinese owner and believed the app’s critical video recommendation technology social media could be reproduced.
Most read on Bloomberg
“I’ve actually talked to a lot of tech companies about working on rebuilding,” Mnuchin said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “I think the algorithms could be rebuilt. So my plan, if we were to buy, would be to rebuild the technology under US leadership, make sure that it’s fully disconnected from ByteDance going forward, and that it’s very robust and secure.
A federal law passed last month in the United States requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., to sell its stake in the popular video app within a year or risk being banned in the country. Even if it agreed to divest — which ByteDance has said it would not do — the company is unlikely to sell its core recommendation algorithm, the key technology that made TikTok a success and propelled the app to more than 170 million American users. a month. The Chinese government is also expected to sign such an agreement.
“The Chinese government has been very clear that they will not grant an export license for the algorithm and I understand that,” Mnuchin said. “We have sensitive technology that we don’t want to transfer to them, and they don’t want to transfer it to the United States.”
That conundrum has left some speculating that a buyer could seek to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations and users — but not the technology behind the app, which would be incredibly difficult and expensive to duplicate. Technology leaders like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have spent years trying to create similar experiences, with varying degrees of success. Mnuchin did not identify the tech companies he had spoken with about the possibility of rebuilding TikTok’s core technology.
Read more: Schmidt says he considered buying TikTok from its Chinese owner
TikTok sued the U.S. government on Tuesday in an attempt to block the divestment or ban law, saying the legislation stifles free speech for the app’s users. Supporters of the law say TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company open the possibility that that country’s government could access U.S. users’ data or influence what appears on their feeds — a claim TikTok and Beijing officials have always rejected it.
In March, Mnuchin told CNBC that he had spoken to potential co-investors about acquiring TikTok with the intention of remaking the app in the United States with local technology. He did not provide additional details at the time.
Mnuchin played a key role in President Donald Trump’s initial efforts to ban the app via a 2020 executive order. As Treasury secretary, he participated in discussions about what a breakup from ByteDance would look like at the time . When President Joe Biden took…
