Make TikTok wonderful again: Kevin OLeary explains his plan to save the social media platform

“Mr.Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary is partnering up with another investor in a bid to save TikTok and hopes China and the Supreme Court will allow them to make it “wonderful again.”The “Shark Tank” star is teaming up with Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt to purchase the platform’s US assets from its parent company, ByteDance, and “rebuild the platform in a way that prioritizes the privacy of its 170 million American users.” TikTok is facing a potential ban due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a law signed by President Biden that passed in Congress last April with bipartisan approval.By midnight on January 19, the app could be removed from US based app stores unless it is divested from its parent company.“I want to work with him [McCourt] because he’s done far more work on the algorithm, and he lets me be part of this deal so that we can buy TikTok without buying the Chinese spyware” O’Leary told “The Big Money Show” Tuesday. TikTok has faced controversy over it being a China-based company and for allegedly being used as spyware software for the Chinese Communist Party.Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have warned about the potential national security threat TikTok allegedly poses via US phones.“The reason TikTok is about to get canceled in the United States is because of algorithms that let you spy,” O’Leary said, explaining how he and McCourt would restructure the platform so that users could decide whether to share their data with TikTok or not.

Under their ownership, O’Leary argued, users that elected to share their data would get paid.“If they do share it, and they want to monetize it, they get a piece of the advertising action.I think that’s fantastic,” he said.

“We’re going to make this thing work the way the market wants it to work, and then we’re going to take it all around the world.”If their bid to acquire the social media platform is success...