Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is putting together an investor group to purchase TikTok, the former Trump cabinet secretary announced in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday morning—as a bill that would ban TikTok if China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the social network moves through Congress.
Mnuchin gave no details on who is in the “investor group” he is putting together.
“This should be owned by U.S. businesses,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, adding that “there's no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.”
Mnuchin gave no details on which other investors were joining the group, but noted “there would be no one investor that controlled this.”
Mnuchin didn’t say whether ByteDance has been receptive to the idea of a sale.