Last week, an aide for Vice President JD Vance reached out to the billionaire Frank McCourt.
The topic at hand was Mr. McCourt’s $20 billion long-shot offer to buy TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app. Mr. Vance’s aide wanted details about the bid, which was one of several public overtures for the app, according to two people familiar with the process.
The inquiry was one of Mr. Vance’s earliest moves toward corralling a deal for the popular app after President Trump tapped him earlier this month to find an arrangement to save it. TikTok was recently banned in the United States under a new federal law that prohibited distribution in the country if it was not sold to a non-Chinese owner, though Mr. Trump delayed enforcement of the law until early April.
Mr. Trump’s assignment plunges Mr. Vance into a fraught geopolitical and corporate negotiation over the fate of the app, which counts some 170 million American users. It is not clear who could buy TikTok in the United States, or even whether China or ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, would allow a sale. And the Trump administration is under scrutiny for its decision to disregard the law’s Jan. 19 deadline for a sale or a ban.
Mr. Vance’s involvement ensures that he and Mr. Trump — both of whom once supported banning TikTok because of national security concerns — have some public accountability for saving it, according to analysts and people involved in negotiations for a sale. Tapping Mr. Vance could also help lend negotiations more credibility, said Peter Harrell, a former Biden White House official who worked on national security, tech and economic issues.
“What he brings to the role is everybody’s going to take his call and take him seriously,” Mr. Harrell said. “Most people, given Trump has been pretty clear he’s tapped Vance for this, will assume that Vance is speaking for the president.”
Mr. Vance’s involvement in a TikTok deal was earlier reported by Punchbowl News and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman for Mr. Vance, Taylor Van Kirk, said in a statement that “President Trump and Vice President Vance are committed to preserving free speech and continuing access to TikTok, while ensuring Americans’ data is protected from any kind of security threat.”
TikTok didn’t return a request for comment.
On Thursday, Apple and Google restored TikTok to their U.S. app stores after receiving letters from the Justice Department assuring them that they would not face fines for carrying TikTok in their app stores.
Mr. Vance worked as a junior venture capitalist and a biotech executive for more than five years, including at Mithril Capital, founded by Peter Thiel, an early Silicon Valley backer of President Trump. That experience helped him forge connections with other influential tech executives and investors like David Sacks, now the White House czar for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and the billionaire Elon Musk.
“He cares deeply about national security, so I believe that with TikTok, he will ensure that Americans’ personal data stops being fed to an authoritarian adversary,” said Crystal McKellar, a venture capitalist who worked with Mr. Vance at Mithril Capital, in a text message.
Mr. Vance, who invested alongside Mr. Thiel in Rumble, a YouTube rival for conservatives, has also expressed distrust of bigger technology companies.
Paul Gallant, a tech policy analyst at TD Cowen, pointed out that a successful TikTok deal would keep one of Google and Meta’s biggest competitors on the market.
“Vance is not a fan of the biggest U.S. internet companies,” he said. Helping TikTok survive “would certainly align with Vance’s personal philosophy on Big Tech.”
Mr. Vance faces a tall task to come up with a deal for TikTok. The last Trump administration official who led an effort to negotiate a deal for TikTok, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who previously worked as a Goldman Sachs banker, couldn’t ultimately finalize anything.
The aide for Mr. Vance who reached out to Mr. McCourt wanted formal documents that explained his bid, which is an offer to buy the app without its coveted algorithm. Mr. McCourt submitted them last week, the people familiar with the process said. The spokeswoman for Mr. Vance did not reply to a request for comment on his office’s engagement with Mr. McCourt.
Jesse Tinsley, the founder of payroll firm Employer.com, has submitted a similar bid to buy the app without the algorithm. His offer, which includes a consortium of investors like the chief executive of Roblox, the video game platform, is for ”more than $30 billion,” he said in an interview. He said his group plans to “recreate the algorithm or something similar with our own team.”
Mr. Tinsley has received commitments for the money from other investors, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, and was also “open to President Trump’s new U.S. sovereign wealth fund,” he said.
But there hasn’t been much dialogue just yet.
“We have not heard back from TikTok or ByteDance,” Mr. Tinsley said. “This whole process is unique in the sense that it’s not a normal M&A process.”
