The United States passed a law last year requiring Chinese entertainment giant ByteDance to sell the app by January 19, 2025, or face a ban.
Chinese authorities are assessing the possibility that Elon Musk would acquire TikTok’s American activities if the popular platform were banned in the United States by the end of the week, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
The United States passed a law last year that requires Chinese entertainment giant ByteDance to sell TikTok by January 19, 2025, or face a ban in the country where the app has 170 million users. The case went up to the American Supreme Court, which heard the arguments of both parties on Friday: Washington says it wants to prevent the risks of espionage and manipulation by Beijing, while the social network and associations accuse the law of stifle freedom of expression. A clear majority of judges were willing to authorize the ban.
The Chinese government and ByteDance have always openly opposed a sale of the American part of TikTok. But “senior Chinese officials had already begun debating contingency plans for TikTok as part of a wide-ranging discussion about how to work with Donald Trump’s administration, one of which involves Musk”confidential sources told Bloomberg. “According to a scenario envisaged by the Chinese government, X (…) would take control of American TikTok and manage the two companies together”specifies Bloomberg. The article notes, however, that the deliberations are “preliminaries”.
Trump says he has a weakness for TikTok
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, created a surprise by displaying his desire to buy Twitter in early 2022. After months of twists and turns and attacks on the platform, he ended up acquiring it for $44 billion. The richest man in the world then renamed it X and used it extensively to support Donald Trump, in addition to his large financial contributions to the Republican.
Donald Trump, who will be president of the United States again in a week, tried to ban TikTok at the end of his first term, in 2020, also in the name of national security. He has since returned to his positions, ensuring that he has a “weak” for the application and its young audience. Besides electric cars and rockets, Elon Musk has co-founded other companies, including xAI, the most recent, specializing in generative artificial intelligence (AI), which requires mountains of fresh data: social networks are ideal for powering AI models. The entrepreneur has also gained political responsibilities. Donald Trump asked him to lead an external advisory mission to make massive savings in federal budgets.
