He lost the Dodgers. Now he wants to win the internet

If the billionaire Frank McCourt succeeds in his bid to buy TikTok, the first thing he’ll do is call his wife. The second? He’ll tell his 9-year-old daughter — who’s been asking when she’ll finally be allowed on the popular video platform like her classmates — “Yes, honey. You can use TikTok now.”

Speaking with Quartz, McCourt was candid and unpretentious, as fired up about restoring the internet’s original ideals as he is about seeing them through. In recent months, he’s talked to outlets from Forbes to Entrepreneur about his sweeping $20 billion plan to take over TikTok, strip out its opaque algorithm, and rebuild the platform on a clean, open stack where users own their data. But the deeper story, like his would-be celebration plans, is more personal.

More than a decade ago, McCourt endured a bruising, very public divorce that cost him the Los Angeles Dodgers and made him tabloid fodder. The experience was a humbling one, reshaping how he thinks about power, privacy, and what it means to be exposed online. So what he’s building now with Project Liberty, his 501(c)(3), is much more than a business venture. Instead, it’s a shot at redemption — for the internet and maybe for himself, too — driven by the conviction that a better digital world is possible. And that’s reason enough for a man in his seventies to take a serious swing at reordering it.

Not your average deal

But how exactly does one buy TikTok, anyway? It’s not a typical sale, McCourt admits.

In 2024, Congress passed a bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a nationwide ban in the U.S., citing national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership and attendant access to nearly 200 million American users' data. The law gave the company a deadline to sell, with enforcement entrusted to the executive branch. President Donald Trump, in office once more and newly attuned to TikTok’s political power, has since extended that deadline multiple times — most recently to June 19th — leaving the platform’s fate and McCourt’s bid in prolonged limbo.

Even so, McCourt remains hopeful. He approached the potential purchase like a seasoned dealmaker: assembling a coalition of investors, hiring bankers and lawyers, and building detailed financial models, despite TikTok being a private company with no publicly available financials. His group then formally submitted their $20 billion bid to both ByteDance and the U.S. Department of Justice. ByteDance acknowledged receipt of the offer but has yet to respond further. As far as he knows, McCourt’s group is the only one to have submitted a formal bid, even as other interested parties — including Oracle’s Larry Ellison – continue circling from the sidelines.

A radical alternative

The purchase, McCourt explains, would be a chance to “re-de-centralize” the internet, which originally “started with a simple protocol.” All too soon, massive tech companies monetized the system by harvesting user data, setting new and disturbing norms about who owns what. McCourt is blunt: “Why not a protocol that empowers users?” He offers a sweeping structural critique: today’s internet has been built to serve devices and companies, not people.

“Data is our personhood. It’s everything about us,” he said. “We should be the ones serving tech platforms with terms of service, not the other way around.”

With this mission in mind, Project Liberty has spent the last four years designing an alternative called DSNP (Decentralized Social Networking Protocol). Unlike Big Tech’s walled gardens, DSNP allows people to carry their identity, content, and connections between apps. McCourt envisions a “verifiable internet” where people can’t be impersonated and don’t lose control of their data every time they sign up for a new app or want to order dinner. It’s as much about ethics as it is about engineering.

TikTok without the algo?

So the architecture for a user-empowered internet already exists, and as McCourt sees it, this gives his TikTok bid a practical edge. He doesn’t want TikTok’s algorithm, which most people view as the platform’s secret sauce and is controlled by Chinese export laws, making it unlikely to be approved for sale. Instead, McCourt wants to migrate TikTok’s massive U.S. user base to Project Liberty’s special infrastructure, transforming the app from a privacy headache into a model for how the internet could work.

Refreshingly, McCourt has no desire to run TikTok himself – he doesn’t want to be the CEO of a social platform. Part of his bidding process involved selecting a management team. He’s also spent time meeting directly with TikTok’s top 20 influencers to lay out his vision: one where creators aren’t trapped in closed ecosystems, but are able to access detailed audience analytics and move their content and followings from one platform to another. If enacted, that would relieve a long-standing pain point for creators frustrated by platform lock-in. This too, McCourt argues, sets his bid apart.

The critics and the crack

When asked what he’d say to those who claim TikTok’s algorithm is the product, he doesn’t hesitate: “No, it’s not. We are the product.” He points out the irony that China itself essentially bans its own youth from using TikTok while Americans consume it en masse. “It’s bad for young people,” he said. “Feeding us sugar, if not crack. It’s hurting America.”

Not everyone is convinced that an alternative structure could work. The writer and TikTok creator Leigh Stein, whose upcoming novel is set in a TikTok hype house, is one dissenter. “The fact that McCourt admits he has never used TikTok is a clear indication to me of how little he understands the proprietary algorithm’s relevance to the platform,” she said in an email to Quartz. “TikTok’s algorithm is so powerful at predicting and anticipating user preferences that every other single social media platform has tried to copy it by adding a For You page (Twitter/X) and by changing their distribution of Reels (Instagram).”

But for a real-life test of McCourt’s thesis that users will hang around even on a much-changed platform, his bid must first succeed.

A different TikTok, a different world

In the meantime, McCourt argues that TikTok moderation would be better for everyone if it weren’t governed by any central system. His version of TikTok would see moderation left to users alone. He envisions a platform where individuals opt in to their interests, with curated content streams available via third parties who’ve earned what he likens to a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” indicating their streams are trustworthy and valuable. Otherwise, he said, “social media is a rage machine.”

The rise of AI only makes his mission more urgent. To McCourt, the rapid adoption of LLMs is just the next phase of a centralized internet, one where companies — not users — control the tools. “AI agents, who do they work for?” he asks, clearly enlivened by the provocative question. “Not us.”

Whether his daughter ever gets to use TikTok or not, he's hoping she'll enjoy a better internet than he's ever known. That's exactly why he's circling back now: not to build a platform for himself but to make it right. The mission, he told Quartz, is "bigger than me."