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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. I think this might be a first though. I'm looking at video of you right now. You have taken to the skies. I believe you're in an airplane. We're testing the limits of in flight Wi Fi. What's what's going on right now?
Well, well, it sounds good on my end. Can you hear me?
Sounds good, We can hear you, we can see you. So so far the test looks good.
Is this starlink? Yeah?
What are you using? Actually, yeah, it's good.
Question. It's good Wi Fi though. That's all I can tell you. So it's uh, it works well and it sufficient. So I'm glad this is the first for you guys. But let's get to Project Liberty and the People's Bid.
Okay, let's get to the People's Bid, and I will not for people watching on YouTube and Bloomberg originals. You can tell the plane that Frank is in. It's not the typical plane that you take and board, you know, group ones one through twelve. Frank travels differently. So, Frank, we do appreciate you taking the time. Let's talk about the people's bid here, because last time you were on the show with us, you had not put out a bid for TikTok. Are you still going for it? And do you have the money?
Yeah, we're still going for it and we have the money. So it's we're we're plowing ahead. Every day it looks, you know, more and like we're leading more and more, like we're leading the path, you know, should the the US TikTok be sold, and we believe it will be, and we're all awaiting the judge's decision, which you could
come out as early as this week. And you know, we believe the government's position is going to be upheld and by Dance is going to have to abide by that and and you know, shut shut down the app or sell it. And so we have been working hard making preparations to put ourselves in a position to to buy the app and move it over to a new protocol where individuals, you know, have owner control their identity and their data and they're not, you know, Surveiled twenty four seven.
Why do you believe that the sale will still be required even though the President elect has said he doesn't want to ban TikTok.
Well, we don't want to ban TikTok either, and I'm glad to hear him say that, because we don't think it's to be banned. And you know, there's one hundred and seventy million people tim using it that enjoy using it, and uh, and we want to keep the TikTok alive.
But he President hasn't said it won't be sold.
I mean, I think he's well aware of the national security risks and uh. You know, Congress acted very quickly and in a rare moment of consensus, legislated that this this app is dangerous for.
Americans and needs to be shut down or sold.
And the President has said he doesn't want to see it shut down and and we, like him, uh, don't want to see it shut down either, and we believe it will be sold and no longer being in Chinese hands after this.
Uh the court ruling.
What problems with TikTok are you looking to solve directify through the people's bid?
Well, the the reason why the Congress that's the legislation in the first place, is because they deemed TikTok a national security threat and you know, amongst other things, by bailing one hundred and seventy million Americans and uh, scraping their their data, their you know, their personal information, and also feeding them information that's favorable to the Chinese government and not so favorable to to to America or to
the USA, to our democracy and and so forth. It's it's really a huge propaganda machine that is that is influencing lots of Americans, uh, you know, by feeding them false information about about an array of situations that are and the information that's fed is is amplified as a pro Chinese perspective as opposed to a anti American and by the way, anti American ones. So it's not a balanced platform. It's actually being used by the Chinese government
to persuade Americans approach anti American positions. That's extremely, extremely unhealthy. And beyond that, it's a surveillance tool. And this is you know, this is very very dangerous for American and Americans.
So with.
By moving the TikTok user base onto the protocol and the platform that Project Liberty has built over the last five years, users won't be surveilled. They'll own and control their identity, they'll own and control their data, they'll be able to get compensated for the use of their data and they'll permission a cheuse. So it's just the opposite of a surveillance machine.
Frank, have you who have you lined up to join you in the bed? Bloomberg Intelligence has said back in May that TikTok's US assets were valued at between thirty five billion and forty billion dollars, So who have you lined up to help with the bid?
You know, we think we think that number is a bit high. But to you know, to be clear, we don't know what TikTok or byte dance rather will be selling, right. We don't know whether they'll be selling the brand or not. The user base is what we're particularly interested in. We're assuming they'll sell they'll sell that, Will they be selling the content and so on and so forth. We think that thirty to forty billion numbers is a bit high. We've circled over twenty billion dollars and we're prepared to
move forward and we'll see. Maybe they'll be more sold than we're anticipating and that will affect the price. But we do know that the algorithm byte Dance algorithm is not available, and that has a huge impact on the value of us TikTok, and it depresses the value.
That part certainly makes sense. Can you give us some names of individuals though, who've lined up to finance this?
No, I'm not in a position to do that until after we hear from the judges, because all of the people that lined up and said, let's let's wait and see what that legal decision is and then and then proceed. So we're getting all of our ducks in a line, and we will be naming names at the appropriate time and the appropriate place. But we're going to take this one step up at a time. It makes no sense to put people just start throwing names around prior to
this legal decision. But once this decision comes down, which we think is imminent by the way, then things get really serious.
And that's when we are going to move very very quickly.
And I assume others, if they're if they're interested, will as well. But we haven't actually heard of anyone else that's a serious bidder at this moment in time.
Frank, if you're not if you're not able to get the algorithm, I mean a lot of people argue that the TikTok algorithm is the secret sauce. It's what it is what keeps people going back to TikTok over and over again and staring at their screens for you know, hours a day. If you don't get that, how do you know people are going to stay and use the app?
The the.
We have people right now working on alternatives to that, and and we just are believed very very strongly that a surveilling people, straping their data and applying algorithms to feed them information and manipulate them, take advantage of them, and so on and so forth is incredibly unhealthy.
By the way, this is the same way that that that our own American.
Made social media apps and so forth work, which we think is also very dangerous. But in this particular case there's also the added national security risks that I referred to earlier. So the way we're not interested in the algorithm, the technology we've built doesn't rely on the algorithm. There will be algorithms, there will be ads, there will be but it won't be top down targeting people and and
surveilling people. It will be an Internet where people signal their interests, permission the use of their data, and are still going to be able to enjoy using the application, They're still going to be able to do all the things that you can currently do with TikTok shop and so on and so forth, and it just it won't be in an exploitive way. It will be in a way that empowers the user base. And by the way, we want to involve the user base in the ownership
of the platform. And it's one of the reasons why we call it the People's Bid. I want to be clear there. I'm not interested in being the CEO of US TikTok, and we have a management team lined up and we have people lined up to go ahead and do this. We need to wait for the judge's decision, which we hope will be coming down as early as Friday of this week.
Frank, you had mentioned US tech companies in US social media companies. I wanted to get your thoughts on AI and whether you think these comempanies in the US have a grasp on artificial intelligence and the rise of it, or whether you think it's really growing faster than you know what the biggest companies in the US can can handle.
Yeah, I have great, great concerns about generative AI and larger language models with the current uh uh tech architecture. And what I mean by that is that generaty of AI is is a fancy name or a more powerful version of the technology we have right, which is a technology that accumulates personal data and which is which is the valuable data and applies algorithms which, by.
The way, our AI and you know to that to go.
Ahead and uh you know, exploit us right? And why on earth, knowing now that the Internet as design is broken, I mean we hear about the the.
Harms every single day.
Knowing that it's broken, why would we take the same technology and make it more powerful before fixing the pieces and parts that are broken and then benefiting from large language models generative AI and and all that AI offers.
What what what Project.
Liberty is against centralized generative AI. We're all for decentralized generative AI, meaning.
A new better Internet.
Frank chairman of McCord Global. This is Bloomberg