If the billionaire Frank McCourt succeeds in his bid to buy TikTok, the first thing he’ll do is call his wife. The second? He’ll tell his 9-year-old daughter — who’s been asking when she’ll finally be allowed on the popular video platform like her classmates — “Yes, honey. You can use TikTok now.”
Speaking with Quartz, McCourt was candid and unpretentious, as fired up about restoring the internet’s original ideals as he is about seeing them through. In recent months, he’s talked to outlets from Forbes to Entrepreneur about his sweeping $20 billion plan to take over TikTok, strip out its opaque algorithm, and rebuild the platform on a clean, open stack where users own their data. But the deeper story, like his would-be celebration plans, is more personal.
More than a decade ago, McCourt endured a bruising, very public divorce that cost him the Los Angeles Dodgers and made him tabloid fodder. The experience was a humbling one, reshaping how he thinks about power, privacy, and what it means to be exposed online. So what he’s building now with Project Liberty, his 501(c)(3), is much more than a business venture. Instead, it’s a shot at redemption — for the internet and maybe for himself, too — driven by the conviction that a better digital world is possible. And that’s reason enough for a man in his seventies to take a serious swing at reordering it.
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