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Elon Musk, a billionaire, has stated that he is not interested in buying out ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular short-video app TikTok, which the US government has been attempting to ban due to national security concerns.
Earlier this month, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, made some remarks at a summit that were made public on Saturday by The WELT Group, a division of the German media conglomerate Axel Springer SE.
“I have not bid for TikTok,” Musk said a week after US President Donald Trump stated he was willing to let Musk buy the ByteDance-owned app if he wanted to.
“I don’t have any plans for what I would do if I had TikTok,” Musk added, explaining that he isn’t familiar with the structure of the short video app and doesn’t use it himself.
Musk added, “I’m not chomping at the bit to acquire TikTok, I do not acquire companies in general, it’s quite rare,” continuing by saying that his extraordinary billion-dollar acquisition of social media company Twitter, now named X, was noteworthy.
“I usually build companies from scratch,” Musk stated.
The president, a Republican, signed an executive order to postpone the January 19th shutdown of the popular short-video app in an effort to prevent its immediate suspension.
U.S. Government’s Pressure on TikTok
In response to lawmakers’ worries that the app could compromise national security by allowing China to coerce ByteDance into sharing user data, the United States government gave the business until January to sell its U.S. assets of TikTok or risk a ban. In the past, TikTok has denied sharing any information about its users in the United States.
Since a regulation in the US went into effect, neither Apple nor Google has added TikTok back to their app stores. As of Friday, TikTok announced that, in an attempt to get around restrictions on the popular platform in the US, it was making its app available to Android users through package kits on its website.
Trump has stated that he has been in discussions with various individuals regarding the acquisition of TikTok and is expected to make a decision regarding the app’s future this month. About 170 million people in the United States utilize it.
The president announced plans to establish a sovereign wealth fund this year by an executive order, and he has hinted that the fund may acquire TikTok.
TikTok’s potential sale has been previously rejected by ByteDance.
Trump‘s decision to support TikTok is different from his earlier position during his first term when he tried to ban the app because he was worried it was sharing Americans’ personal information with China.
As of late, Trump has claimed that he has “a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” praising the app for its role in his victory among young people during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Outside of normal business hours, neither ByteDance nor TikTok responded quickly to a request for comment.
