What if Olympique de Marseille president Frank McCourt bought the TikTok app!

This Sunday, January 19, the flagship application of the moment TikTok was inaccessible on American soil. A few hours before his inauguration, Donald Trump reconnected the application. He also granted a 90-day period for a potential American investor to acquire 50% of the platform. A former detractor of TikTok, Trump is now trying to save it.

Current owner of Olympique de Marseille since 2016, American Frank McCourt has taken on a new major challenge: the acquisition of TikTok.
During an interview on the show “Face the Nation” on CBS News, the seasoned businessman reveals his project entitled “People's Bid for TikTok”.

“We are not looking to reproduce the existing version,” he said, emphasizing his desire to reinvent the use of social networks. Concerned about the harmful use of our data, his goal is to transform the platform and its operation. “We are looking to move the 170 million users to a new protocol to give people control over their identity and digital data.”

An ambitious project

For 8 months, the septuagenarian has been working, supported by his group “Project Liberty” to raise the necessary funds for the purchase of the famous Chinese application, whose value is estimated at more than 97 billion euros. This will not be easy because the parent company ByteDance does not seem willing to give up such a lucrative platform.

Frank McCourt hopes to inspire people to take back control of their digital lives: “I want to give people control over their identity and their data”, with the goal of creating “a better internet.” All this information is available on the website of “liberty project.”

Tough opponents

Several other investors are also in the race to buy TikTok, including the famous YouTuber MrBeast who expressed his interest in a tweet, published on his X account: “Ok, fine, I’ll buy TikTok so I don’t get banned,” “ironically, a lot of billionaires have reached out to me since I tweeted this, let’s see if we can make it happen.”

Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, X and Donald Trump’s right-hand man, is also interested in this matter, but he leaves doubts about it. In a recent tweet on his X platform, he revived interest in “vine”, a short video application.