The Chinese government is reportedly weighing a last-ditch plan to sell TikTok’s U.S. business to tech billionaire Elon Musk, giving one of Donald Trump’s closest allies control over two of the country’s largest social media networks.
The preliminary plan, first reported by The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, is an effort to evade a federal ban signed by President Joe Biden last spring and slated to go live on January 19. TikTok and its corporate parent, the China-based ByteDance, had hoped the Supreme Court would overrule the ban on free speech grounds—but justices instead seemed receptive to the government’s position during oral arguments last week.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that the short-form video app, with its 170 million American users, poses a national security risk because of its parent company’s close ties with China. To continue operating in the U.S., the April law requires that ByteDance divest its U.S. operations to an American entity. That’s where Musk comes in. According to the Journal, Chinese officials have floated the idea of brokering a deal with Musk, whose electric-vehicle maker, Tesla, already does billions of dollars of business in China.
It’s unclear if Musk or top Chinese leaders are in on the plan, the Journal reported, while ByteDance officials are still in the dark. “We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. Musk has also not commented on the report, though he has opposed a TikTok ban in the past: “In my opinion, TikTok should not be banned in the USA, even though such a ban may benefit the X platform,” he wrote on X last April. “Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression. It is not what America stands for.”
A sale to Musk is only one of several Hail Mary plans that Chinese officials are reportedly considering, though they can’t sell the app on ByteDance’s behalf. China and Bytedance could also appeal to Trump, who—in a stark reversal from the stance he took during his first term—now says he’d like to keep TikTok in the U.S. In a late December brief filed with the Supreme Court, Trump asked the justices to delay the ban and allow him to “negotiate a resolution” instead. Both Trump and Musk have also met recently with TikTok CEO Shou Chew, the Journal reported.
Musk’s acquisition of TikTok, should it occur, would represent a dramatic shift in the American social media landscape. Musk already owns X, the country’s 10th most popular social platform, with an estimated 29.6 million daily users in the United States. Since acquiring the site in 2022, Musk has radically recast it in his own image, firing thousands of employees and rolling back guardrails meant to fend off abuse and misinformation. He has also transformed his personal X account into perhaps the largest digital bully pulpit the world has ever seen, opining on foreign elections, spreading conspiracies and attracting the scrutiny of European regulators for potentially advantaging his favored candidates in users’ feeds. On top of all that, Musk is an official advisor to the second Trump administration, and is expected to take an office in the White House complex after Trump's inauguration.
English (US) ·