Since sabotaging the economy on his way out the door, Steven Mnuchin, the former secretary of the Treasury Department under Donald Trump, has made relatively few appearances in the media.
He hasn’t written an exposé on his time in the White House. He hasn’t joined the sad parade of hangers-on who appear at Trump rallies. Instead, Mnuchin busied himself collecting a big check from Saudi Arabia and using it to help start a $2.5 billion private equity fund. But other than buying into an entertainment company and testifying in support of a Trump ally suspected of making off with confidential information, Mnuchin seems largely to have stayed out of the news.
Now he’s back in a big way, heading up a conveniently timed effort to purchase the popular video app TikTok a day after the House passed legislation that would force the social media app’s Chinese owners to divest or withdraw from the U.S. market.
As CNN reports, Mnuchin is putting together an investment group to buy the app—and its user base of 1.5 billion accounts—from Chinese company ByteDance.
In an interview with CNBC, Mnuchin declared that the app is “worth a lot of money.”
Which is true. Elon Musk famously paid $44 billion for a user base roughly one-third the size of the one held by TikTok. While it’s clear that Musk overpaid, it’s likely that TikTok, with its younger user base and reputation for starting trends, will go for a higher amount.
Mnuchin had a reported personal net worth of around $400 million in 2019, and even the total value of his investment fund isn’t going to come close to covering a check to ByteDance. Whatever Mnuchin’s bid for the app may be, he’ll need to gather other investors.
But whatever the price may be, one thing is sure: TikTok will be sold a lot cheaper if the legislation making it through Congress is signed.
That legislation gives ByteDance only six months to either sell off TikTok or be shut out of the U.S. market. That brief window means that if ByteDance does choose to sell the app, it will be doing so under duress and probably with a limited set of suitors. And it knows that if it does not sell the app, it will be losing access to one of its most lucrative markets.
Mnuchin stands a much better chance of being able to come up with a potential buyout deal under these conditions. He’s also likely to get TikTok a lot cheaper than if he had walked up to ByteDance before this legislation was introduced and tried to strike a deal.
It’s probably going past the boundaries of reasonable speculation and edging toward conspiracy theory to suggest that forcing ByteDance to divest themselves of TikTok at fire-sale prices is the intention of the legislation now heading to the Senate. It’s more likely that the biggest part of the push against TikTok came simply because it was a convenient target of demonstrating strength against the Chinese Communist Party. H.R. 7521 was originally sponsored by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher. He also chairs the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which was formed in January 2023.
But even if making TikTok available for a Trump ally to snap up at a bargain price wasn’t the intention, it could well end up being the effect.
Trump has his own platform, Truth Social, which is currently being roiled by a lawsuit between Trump and the founders. With only about 607,000 active users, Truth Social is a relative pipsqueak, but it provides Trump with a friendly space to launch his rants.
Musk, who recently met with Trump, frequently spreads conspiracy theories about immigrants, and uses the site formerly known as Twitter to spread a particular form of racism. That site has over half a billion active users.
Should Mnuchin gain control of TikTok, that would place Trump allies in control of a significant portion of major social media platforms.
At a time when traditional journalism and media outlets from newspapers to blogs are facing significant declines, social media sites are still growing. And there’s a serious threat that authoritarian white nationalism will have much greater power on those sites.
As Musk has demonstrated at X, the hand at the helm sets the rules for what can and cannot be said, which ideas get promoted, and which users get silenced. It’s easy to understand why Mnuchin and his wealthy friends would like that level of control over TikTok.
Maybe someone other than Mnuchin will buy TikTok, but whoever makes the winning offer to ByteDance is going to be someone with deep pockets. And considering the discouraging lack of interest displayed by any progressive billionaires in rescuing foundering traditional media outlets, no one should count on them popping up this time, either.
The ripple effects of the Dobbs decision are impacting not only the right to an abortion but also abortion funding, IVF, and even recreational sex. Joining us on this week's episode of "The Downballot" is Grace Panetta, a political reporter at The 19th who has closely covered the electoral consequences of this ever-widening set of issues. Panetta highlights key races this year where reproductive rights will take center stage, including ballot initiatives in multiple states, efforts to repeal bans on public funding of abortions, and an upcoming special election in Alabama, the state that just thrust IVF into the limelight.
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