The U.S. Treasury Secretary under Trump is seeking to assemble a group of investors to acquire TikTok

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The former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he is assembling a group of investors to try to buy TikTok after the House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday that would force the social network to disassociate from its parent company in China or else risk being banned in the United States.

"I believe the legislation should be passed and I think it should be sold," Mnuchin said on a CNBC program this Thursday. "It's a big business and I'm going to form a group to buy TikTok," added the man who was Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump's administration.

However, Mnuchin did not specify who the other investors in the deal would be or the potential valuation of this popular social network.

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This bill about TikTok — a platform with 170 million users in the United States — is now heading to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, although President Joe Biden's administration has indicated that it will sign the legislation if it is approved.

Mnuchin said that TikTok should be owned by an American company.

"There's no way the Chinese would allow an American company to own something similar in China," reasoned Mnuchin.

This would not be the first high-profile deal in which Mnuchin has participated since he left the Trump administration, as last week Liberty Strategic Capital, Mnuchin's firm, was one of the main investors in a billion-dollar increase to stabilize New York Community Bancorp.

Former President Trump tried at one point to ban TikTok due to the threat of this network "to national security," although the measure ended up in the courts and was annulled by the now President, Joe Biden, without it coming into effect.

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During that period of time ByteDance was negotiating with Microsoft to sell part of the company.

Since then, Trump has changed course and has spoken out against the TikTok ban.

For his part, millionaire investor Kevin O'Leary, known for being one of the judges on the television show "Shark Tank," said this Monday on Fox that if the U.S. veto continues, he would also be interested in buying the platform.