Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on TikTok: We are interested in buying or investing in it

Be not that long ago and then followed up by an interview did when you said somewhat unexpectedly or at least looking for an investor group or put together a group to buy tick Tock wanted to start there if we could given it is now on pace to be banned. The legislation has been signed. Where are you and your efforts to potentially be there Should there be an opportunity to buy the assets outside of China? Well, we’re still very interested in buying it. We’re investing in it because it may not be a purchase. It could be a spin off and investing in it which would keep the existing investors, but I dilute down the Chinese ownership. We’ve spent a lot of time with technology companies. We think given the year it can be rebuilt so it can be separated for by dances technology and if the company wants to pursue, we’re very interested. But the problem is if they’re going to pursue litigation and that takes six months, it will inevitably end up with too short of a period of time to rebuild the technology. Why understand the timeline there because it has a year. Could you not potentially agree to some sort of a deal during the course of that where you would be have an opportunity to rebuild the algorithm, the source code so to speak? I don’t understand why the litigation would interfere. Well, the best outcome would be if they’d agreed to do a deal now, right. And you’d have a year to rebuild the technology, which I think would be a major effort but could be done. But my concern is if they spend 6 months litigating and then they decide to do a deal and there’s almost, there’s only six months left, it’s just impossible to build the technology in that time. I’m sorry, I understand now. Well, they do seem, I mean let’s go, let’s go to the to the Chinese here. It’s always difficult to know and you would certainly be in a better position given you have a lot more history in terms of understanding the communications from that country. But it doesn’t appear they’re particularly interested in allowing Byte Dance to sell or spin off the acid. Is that your understanding? Well, they’re clearly not interested in giving an export license on the critical technology, which is the algorithm. And that’s why our premise has been we’d have to disconnect it and we’d have to rebuild it ahead of time. So from a technology standpoint. I think we could do it without the license from a political standpoint. It’s obviously a more difficult political situation now that the law has been passed. You also mentioned something though about a potential spin where then you would dilute the existing owners of bike dance, I guess who would be a part owners of the spin but come in as additional capital. Is that something you’ve discussed as a possibility? It is. It is something I’ve discussed. I think it’s actually the best way to do it because there is 60% foreign ownership now. And I think many of those investors would like to stay in. So it doesn’t have to be a complete sale, it just has to be disconnected from bike dance and it needs to get the Chinese ownership below 20% to comply with the law.