Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bipartisan bill that if signed into law would force ByteDance to either divest its flagship global app or face an effective ban on TikTok within the U.S.
“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who leads Liberty Strategic Capital, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.
The bill is now headed to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, though President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the legislation if reaches his desk.
“This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have highlighted TikTok’s reach in the U.S. — by its own estimates, 170 million Americans use the app — as providing the Chinese government with ready access and influence over the U.S.
Major tech investors, including Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois, have publicly or privately decried the social media platform as a pernicious influence.
Still, it remains unclear if the Chinese government would permit ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. buyer. TikTok has lobbied furiously against the bill, including a concerted pitch to its user base and through videos on its platform.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has implied that a sale is not an option. China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin described the bipartisan push as indicative of “robber’s logic” toward TikTok, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
ByteDance was valued at $220 billion at its last funding round in 2023, according to PitchBook data. While a discrete valuation for TikTok was not immediately clear, any sale price for the U.S. division would likely be less.
TikTok’s most valuable asset and, to lawmakers, its most worrying weapon, is its algorithm, which delivers tailored content to users and was developed in China. Any sale of TikTok without the algorithm would be significantly less attractive to potential buyers.
Mnuchin did not specify who the other investors would be in such a deal or the potential valuation for the social media site.
There are other interested buyers. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was shopping a potential deal to prospective partners.
Last week, Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital was a lead investor in a $1 billion capital raise to stabilize New York Community Bancorp.
Mnuchin served as Treasury secretary under former President Donald Trump. That administration also took an antagonistic stance toward TikTok, which ultimately resulted in ByteDance striking a data partnership with Oracle. Trump has since reversed course and come out against a TikTok ban.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X Handheld devices
Source: Xbox
Microsoft Xbox players will soon be able to take their favorite games anywhere with the launch of the new ROG Xbox Ally handhelds.
This is a first for Xbox, which has never released a handheld before.
The devices, developed in collaboration with ASUS, offer a full-screen Xbox experience meant for portable play.
Players will be able to access Xbox games, stream content, and play on the go with built-in support for cloud gaming.
“Players can look forward to an approachable gaming experience that travels with you wherever you go, featuring several new and first-of-their kind features on both devices,” Microsoft said in a press release.
The announcement follows last week’s debut of Nintendo‘s flagship Switch 2 and sets the stage for a new chapter in portable gaming.
U.S. data center operator Vantage has raised 720 million euros ($821.4 million) — the first of its kind deal in Europe.
The asset-backed securitization (ABS) deal, the first ever euro-denominated with data center assets on the continent, involves four data centers in Germany.
The company said it will be paying on average a 4.3% coupon on the bonds issued through the process.
In an ABS, Vantage raises money by using its data center infrastructure and future revenues from the facilities as collateral.
Vantage said it will use the funds primarily to pay off existing construction loans previously secured for the facilities.
“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Sharif Metwalli, chief financial officer of Vantage Data Centers, told CNBC.
Vantage added that despite the large sum borrowed, the demand from investors exceeded the amount raised.
“So this transaction was actually pretty highly levered, frankly,” Rich Cosgray, senior vice president of global capital markets at Vantage Data Centers told CNBC. “It was higher leverage than our prior transaction and we had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level.”
“Yet, despite that, we were basically two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings, and we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process,” Cosgray added.
The four facilities — two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt — have access to around 55 megawatts of power and “are fully leased to hyperscale customers,” the company said in a statement. The four facilities were valued at more than $1 billion earlier this year.
Last year, Vantage also raised £600 million through the first-ever securitization of a data center in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). The deal involved two units from the company’s Cardiff campus with 148 megawatts of electricity power. Across the region, the company has 2,500 megawatts of data center capacity either operational or under development.
The transaction was led by Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank as joint lead managers and Vantage was represented by the British law firm Clifford Chance.
IonQ is buying United Kingdom-based quantum computing startup Oxford Ionics in a deal valued at nearly $1.1 billion.
Shares gained about 4%.
The companies said in a release that the deal will combine IonQ’s quantum computing hardware and software knowledge with Oxford Ionics’ semiconductor chip technologies. The company aims to deliver breakthroughs in the field and capitalize on growing revenue opportunities.
“We believe the advantages of our combined technologies will set a new standard within quantum computing and deliver superior value for our customers through market-leading enterprise applications,” said IonQ CEO Niccolo De Masi in a release.
The deal, which is expected to close this year, includes $1.065 billion worth of IonQ shares and about $10 million in cash. The merged company expects to build systems with 256 qubits by 2026, over 10,000 by 2027 and 2 million by 2030.
Interest in quantum computing has skyrocketed in recent months after technology giants Microsoft and Alphabet announced new chip breakthroughs. Experts tout the technology’s ability to solve intricate computing tasks unachievable by other computers.
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IonQ’s CEO previously told CNBC that he wants the company to become the “800-pound gorilla” in the quantum world.
Shares of Maryland-based company, which went public through a special purpose acquisition company in late 2021, are down about 6% year to date. The stock has soared more than 400% from a year ago.