Kevin O’Leary says he’s offering $20 billion cash for TikTok

Investor Kevin O’Leary, best known for his role on "Shark Tank," revealed during a Friday appearance on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom that he had offered TikTok’s owners $20 billion in cash to purchase the platform.

This development comes as a bipartisan law signed by President Biden designates TikTok as a national security threat. The legislation requires ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to either divest from the platform or sell it to allow TikTok to remain in U.S. app stores. ByteDance faces a Sunday deadline to comply.

The Supreme Court upheld the law on Friday, rejecting TikTok’s legal challenge and effectively endorsing the impending ban.

O’Leary highlighted the significant penalties facing service providers that enable access to TikTok after the deadline.

“As of midnight on the 19th, any service provider—whether it’s Apple, Oracle, or a video compression technology company working in a consulting capacity—will face a $5,000 daily fine per user,” O’Leary told anchor Bill Hemmer. “With 170 million users, that’s over a billion dollars in fines per day.”

He noted that companies are now evaluating the risks of maintaining access to the app as the deadline approaches.

O’Leary also discussed the uncertainty surrounding potential actions by the incoming Trump administration, which might challenge the law.

“There’s a question of whether an executive order could override a law passed by Congress,” O’Leary said. “There’s precedent from a 1937 case, but the outcome is unclear.”

The Canadian investor argued that the U.S. government has not been able to confirm whether data from American TikTok users is being shared with Chinese authorities. However, he suggested the risk of such activity is too significant to ignore.

“Nobody fully understands the extent to which TikTok’s algorithm shares data. It’s been widely speculated, but there’s no definitive evidence,” O’Leary explained.

He attributed the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban to concerns over potential data risks, calling it a key factor in their ruling.