Billionaire Frank McCourt says he is putting together a consortium to buy TikTok

Billionaire businessman and real estate mogul Frank McCourt said Wednesday that he is putting together a consortium to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. This increases the number of investors looking to benefit from a new federal law that requires TikTok's China-based parent company to sell the popular platform and threatens a ban.

McCourt is organizing the offering in consultation with investment bank Guggenheim Securities and “with the goal of putting people and data empowerment at the heart of the platform's design and purpose,” according to an announcement on the website of its Project Liberty initiative.

Should a sale occur, the former Los Angeles Dodgers owner said he would plan to restructure TikTok and give people more agency “over their digital identities and data” by migrating the platform to an open-source protocol , which enables more transparency.

McCourt said he doesn't personally use TikTok, but his companies and his online-focused initiative do. The offering is an extension of his long-standing interest in redesigning the Internet with better privacy, an effort he is focusing on through Project Liberty. He founded the project “to build a new digital citizen architecture for a safer and healthier Internet,” according to the organization’s website.

So far, his vision to remake TikTok has been supported by Jonathan Haidt, a well-known social psychologist whose recent book, “The Anxious Generation,” focuses on how smartphones and social media have contributed to a mental health crisis among young people.

“We thought this was a really fantastic opportunity to accelerate the creation of an alternative Internet,” McCourt said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Other investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have expressed a desire to buy TikTok. However, parent company ByteDance has already stated that it has no plans to sell the platform. Some experts have also pointed out that the Chinese government is also unlikely to approve a sale — especially one that includes the recommendation engine that powers the videos that populate users' feeds.

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McCourt said he is not interested in TikTok's current algorithm because “top-down” recommendation engines conflict with his view on how such platforms should be managed. He also believes ByteDance will eventually sell TikTok's US business.

For now, however, the company is resisting the law passed last month that would disrupt one of its most lucrative markets.

Last week, ByteDance and TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government to prevent the law from taking effect. On Tuesday, eight TikTok creators filed their own lawsuit, arguing the law violates their First Amendment right to free speech.

The company is also fighting a legal battle in Montana to block a state law that would ban the video-sharing platform.

On Tuesday, TikTok, Montana users and the state of Montana agreed to put on hold a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Montana's first-in-the-nation ban while the federal lawsuits are decided.

Montana's law, which was temporarily blocked before it could take effect Jan. 1, would be overridden if a company not based in a country designated as a foreign adversary acquires TikTok.

According to Forbes, McCourt is worth $1.4 billion. He sold the Dodgers to Guggenheim Baseball Management in 2012 for $2 billion. In 2016 he bought the French football club Marseille.

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Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana, contributed reporting.

Haleluya Hadero, The Associated Press