Billionaire Frank McCourt, founder of Project Liberty and a longtime critic of how technology companies use data, has built a coalition of investors that has made informal commitments of more than $20 billion of capital to buy TikTok, Axios reported Thursday.

"This landmark acquisition would catalyze our long-committed desire to usher in the era of an upgraded internet — one that prioritizes safety, democracy, and civil discourse," McCourt told Axios in a statement. "The technology we are building respects individuals by returning to them ownership and control of their identity and their data, not by surveilling them."

TikTok owner ByteDance, which allegedly has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, is facing a congressionally mandated deadline to sell the popular video app or risk having it banned in the U.S. Concerns have grown that the CCP is using TikTok's algorithm to gather sensitive data on Americans.

In April, President Joe Biden signed legislation that gave ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, with the possibility of an additional three-month grace period, before it would be shut down. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is deliberating on a lawsuit TikTok filed against the federal government, seeking to strike down the law.

McCourt founded Project Liberty in 2021 to build a better internet, "where the data is ours to manage, the platforms are ours to govern, and the power is ours to reclaim," according to its website. Project Liberty, Axios reported, said its bid for TikTok has the support of several internet pioneers, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The group is working on its bid in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and Kirkland & Ellis, a global law firm, according to Axios.

The price tag for TikTok could range between $20 billion and $100 billion, depending on how ByteDance splits up the U.S. part of the business.

McCourt told Axios that Project Liberty "is uniquely positioned to assume stewardship of TikTok" because of the tech and governance protocols it has built to prioritize user privacy and safety.

"This is possible because we're not influenced by foreign actors, we're not beholden to Big Tech, and we've built the necessary technology that can support this powerful platform loved by more than 170 million Americans," he said.

The Chinese government can prevent the sale of TikTok's algorithm, and the operations between TikTok's U.S. business and those of ByteDance might be difficult to sever.

"We doubt very much that China would sell TikTok with the algorithm," McCourt told The New York Times in May. "We're the one bidder that doesn't want the algorithm because we're talking about a different architecture, a different way of thinking about the internet and how it operates."

He added there is value in TikTok's huge user base, its content, the brand, and "a lot of technology short of the algorithm."