By Sheila Dang and Krystal Hu
(Reuters) - U.S. billionaire businessman Frank McCourt is crafting a fundamental overhaul of TikTok's business model as part of a plan to bid for the Chinese-owned short-form video app, he told Reuters.
McCourt, who formerly owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he has received verbal funding commitments totaling $20 billion from a consortium of investors to rescue the app from legal purgatory as it awaits a Supreme Court decision to determine if it will be forced to sell its U.S. operations.
His vision for TikTok includes revamping the company's advertising model so that users will have control over the ads and type of content they want to see. Over time, TikTok could earn revenue through ecommerce and licensing data for artificial intelligence training models - with users' consent - which will diminish the business' reliance on ads.
"When you give permission for your data to be used and you receive compensation, it's flipping this 180 degrees and giving the user the power," McCourt said this week.
The plan faces several hurdles, including TikTok's repeated assertions that it cannot be divested from its owner, Chinese tech firm ByteDance.
McCourt said the bid for TikTok would exclude the algorithm that determines the content that users see, in order to reduce complications for ByteDance. The Chinese government in 2020 added content recommendation algorithms to its export-control list, requiring a divestiture or sale of TikTok's algorithm to go through its administrative licensing procedures.
TikTok's appeal to the Supreme Court is a last-ditch effort to overturn a law signed by U.S. President Joe Biden that seeks to force a sale over national security concerns, or else the app will be banned on Jan. 19.
McCourt said he believes the Supreme Court will uphold the law, after which ByteDance could be open to negotiations. Until then, he is focused on smoothing the path to an acquisition.
McCourt said he and his team have had "preliminary conversations" with members of President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration. Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020 but has since reversed his view, saying on Dec. 16 that he has "a warm spot in my heart for TikTok."
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
The team is also speaking with potential CEO candidates for the new TikTok, McCourt said.
One source familiar with the matter said the team approached V. Pappas, TikTok's former chief operating officer. Pappas did not respond to a request for comment. McCourt declined to name who he is speaking with for the CEO role.
The plan for TikTok will also include migrating its technology onto an open-source protocol developed by Project Liberty, an organization founded by McCourt. The protocol would allow users to control their data and easily move it elsewhere on the internet. The plan is influencing the search for a CEO.
"This is both a big project to scale the technology that we've built, but it is also a vision for a better internet. We're talking to people who share that vision and have the capacity and skills to do both," McCourt said.