Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has plans to reinvent the social-media app.
ildly popular social app TikTok will go dark in the U.S. on June 19—unless President Donald Trump throws it another lifeline. Trump would have to extend his protection for the app against a national security-inspired 2024 law that demands its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sell TikTok or close U.S. operations. Trump indicated on Tuesday that an extension—which would be the third—is a possibility, telling reporters on Air Force One that he thinks “Probably yeah, yeah,” it’ll happen.
The TikTok saga has wound on, one way or another, since a then-anti-TikTok President Trump signed an executive order banning the app back in 2020.
But through the recent tangled twists and complicated turns of this tale, one character has remained set on a plan for remaking TikTok in a new, more user-friendly image: entrepreneur Frank McCourt. The billionaire has owned the L.A. Dodgers baseball team as well as Dodger Stadium, and now owns French soccer club Olympique de Marseille.
His “People’s Bid for TikTok” group, which is a self-styled consortium of interested parties and investors that’s earned the support of the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is still seeking to buy the social app for a reported $20-billion sum.
In an interview with Inc., McCourt explains that he still thinks it might happen. And the thousands of small or one-person U.S. businesses that rely on the app to reach customers or sell products are very much on his mind.
To read the full article, visit the Inc. website here.