The President of the United States, Donald Trump, proposed on Monday to create a sovereign wealth fund to buy the platform TikTok in order to preserve its use in this country.
"Other countries have sovereign wealth funds," at the moment he was signing the executive order through which he orders US officials to establish this fund in the nation, published CNN.
The aforementioned media outlet detailed that there are funds of this type in Norway and Saudi Arabia.
“If we make the right deal, we’ll do it; otherwise, we won’t... And we could put that in the background of the sovereign wealth,” Trump said in the midst of the deadline that TikTok has to find a buyer by next April. If ByteDance does not find a new owner, the Chinese platform will be banned in the United States.
For now, President Trump maintains that he is working on an agreement for TikTok to remain active for the 170 million American users.
Sovereign wealth fund and viability in the United States
CNN detailed that it is "unlikely" to create a sovereign wealth fund in the United States to buy TikTok, much less do so before April.
“It is not clear who would execute it or if they could gather the tens of billions of dollars estimated to be needed to buy the platform. In addition, an acquisition of TikTok by the United States government could raise some difficult questions, including how the platform would be managed,” says the quoted source.
The aforementioned portal presented an explanation by Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and specialist in technology law, who indicated that Trump's proposal of the sovereign wealth fund could work within the framework of the law on sale or prohibition, which was approved by Congress and enacted by the previous president, Joe Biden. According to this, ByteDance could not own more than 20% of TikTok.
“If the United States government takes a major stake in TikTok, the app could ‘become ungovernable’ due to First Amendment protections, which could restrict the government from taking strong actions against — or even, potentially, promoting and degrading through an algorithm — certain types of speech,” says CNN.