Los angeles dodgers frank mccourt biography
Who is Frank McCourt, the billionaire trying to buy TikTok?
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McCourt sold the Los Angeles Dodgers for a hefty sum in 2012. Here’s how he’s been building his business and media empire since, and setting up a consortium to purchase TikTok.
Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Frank McCourt —best known as the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers—has placed a bid to buy TikTok through a group he started called Project Liberty, which is advocating that user data be owned by users rather than by tech giants like TikTok parent ByteDance, Meta and Alphabet. Project Liberty announced in May 2024 that it was organizing a bid. Then on Thursday, January 9 it said that it had made an official offer, dubbed the People’s Bid for TikTok.
McCourt and Project Liberty made the offer in partnership with investment bank Guggenheim Securities, law firm Kirkland & Ellis and a consortium of investors—including Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary and several of the leading technologists already participating in the Project Liberty initiative. The dollar amount of the offer wasn’t disclosed, but Project Liberty’s plan would also require debt financing from “one of the largest banks in the United States.”
McCourt has a track record of heavy criticism of tech giants, especially of Chinese-owned TikTok. “We have to break the model or evolve the model into one where it returns the control, the agency, the choice, the ownership and the rights to individuals,” McCourt, who is 70, told Forbes in November 2023. “It’s either really Chinese tech or American. Those are your choices.”
McCourt’s consortium claimed to have more than $20 billion in commitments from its investors, per a December press release. That figure is what McCourt thinks TikTok is worth, he told the New York Times on January 10, and is on the lower end of estimated valuations from analysts and executives. (TikTok likely generates less than 15% of About: Frank McCourt (executive)
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Frank H. McCourt, Jr. (C’75)
Frank H. McCourt, Jr., is an accomplished business and sports leader, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the current owner of the French football club Olympique de Marseille, and Executive Chairman at McCourt Global , a leader in building value through entrepreneurial, strategic and philanthropic investments. With family roots in real estate and construction dating back four generations to 1893, McCourt has achieved critical success over his 35+ year career, with initiatives ranging from the development of Boston’s Seaport to large, mixed-use projects in New York City, Miami, Austin and elsewhere.
McCourt purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004 and guided the organization through several important initiatives, including the renovation of Dodger Stadium and the development of a new spring training facility at Camelback Ranch in Arizona. During his ownership, the Los Angeles Dodgers achieved victory in the postseason for the first time in 16 years. The team appeared in back-to-back National League Championship Series for the first time in 33 years. And for the first time ever, the Los Angeles Dodgers reached the playoffs in four of six seasons. In 2012, McCourt sold the team for $2.15 billion — the largest sale of a professional sports franchise in history.
In 2013, McCourt acquired a 50% interest in the Global Champions Tour, an international show-jumping series that draws the best international riders and horses in the sport to its premier circuit of events across Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East. Regarded as the Formula One of show jumping, this growing championship series features the highest level of competitions taking place in the most iconic locations in the world’s greatest cities. Focused on expanding the global appeal of show jumping and creating significant growth opportunities for the Tour, McCourt introduced the seri
Full Name
Frank McCourt, Jr.
Job Title
Founder, Project Liberty; CEO
Company
McCourt Global
Brief Biography
Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is a civic entrepreneur and the CEO of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future through its work across the real estate, sports, technology, media, and finance industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Frank is proud to extend his family’s 130-year legacy of merging community and social impact with financial results, an approach that started when the original McCourt Company was launched in Boston in 1893.
Frank is a passionate supporter of multiple academic, civic, and cultural institutions and initiatives. He is the founder of Project Liberty, a visionary effort to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data. The project includes the development of a groundbreaking, open-source internet protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which will be owned by the public to serve as a new web infrastructure. It also includes the creation of the McCourt Institute, launched with founding partners Sciences Po in Paris and by Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to advance research, bring together technologists and social scientists, and develop a governance model for the internet’s next era. In 2020, Frank launched Unfinished, an initiative that aims to strengthen civic life in the digital age by redirecting technology, especially social media, to fuel collaboration over division; renewing and strengthening civic institutions to accelerate inclusive problem-solving; and growing a fairer economy.
Frank has served on Georgetown University’s Board of Directors for many years and, in 2013, made a $100 million founding investment to create Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He expanded on this in