It’s the soap opera in the tech world at the start of 2025: will the TikTok application be banned in the United States, yes or no? This Tuesday, January 14, we learn that Elon Musk could buy TikTok. Here’s why we think it’s a real problem.
The facts: Elon Musk on the verge of buying TikTok for $40 billion
The richest man in the world, you know him, is Elon Musk. The billionaire boss of Tesla, At least, this is a serious lead raised by the media Bloomberg. Asked about this, a TikTok spokesperson told AFP that he did not wish to “comment on a pure fiction“.
A fiction? Really ? Bloomberg is an extremely well-informed media outlet. According to our colleagues, the discussions are only one preliminary stagebut they do seem to exist. Bloomberg even specifies that TikTok would have been valued between 40 and 50 billion dollars and that the deal provides for Elon Musk to begin building his great network which would mix both the video platform TikTok and the purely social platform X.
Why can we believe it? Besides the seriousness of Bloomberg, it is clear that TikTok is in trouble in the United States and that the application must find a way to get out of it at all costs. If the network does nothing, it could be expelled from American soil in less than a week, on January 19. Uncle Sam’s Justice was quite clear: the application would represent Chinese interference in American politics.
To avoid manipulation and potential espionage attempts, Washington therefore required ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, to sell its app to an American actor. And who can afford to stretch more than 40 billion to expand their empire? These people can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the name Elon Musk is the most obvious to everyone.
Why is this a serious problem?
Elon Musk is an outspoken political activist. Since buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, the CEO of Tesla has done everything to use his power of influence to get Donald Trump elected. Recently re-elected, President Trump even thanked the billionaire’s support by appointing him to head a “government efficiency” department. Musk is the Trump administration.
American justice is surely right to be wary of the power of influence that TikTok can have on young minds. After all, TikTok has 170 million active users in the United States. But how can we justify condemning potential interference by Chinese politics while validating certain interference by American politics? Musk, as the owner of Twitter, has already shown that he is not shy about using his position to promote his personal opinions, whether on political, scientific or economic topics. If it also controlled TikTok, it could potentially manipulate algorithms to promote certain narratives or censor others, which can only harm pluralism of ideas and democracy.
In France, we are well aware of the problem of media concentration. The concentration of social networks is perhaps an even more serious matter. Elon Musk’s power of influence, among other things on European politics, is growing day by day. If he acquired TikTok, one of the most influential social media platforms with more than a billion active users, Musk would control a disproportionate share of the global digital ecosystem, spanning communications, transportation, and energy and personal data. Such centralization could pose a governance problem: pfew actors could balance or regulate such power.
Not to mention the problem of collecting personal data. TikTok is already regularly singled out on this subject: behavioral data, geographic data, metadata… providing all this information to the American government seems just as worrying to us as if it were the Chinese government.
On the geopolitical side, this acquisition would destroy all balance. Because yes, TikTok is currently a symbol of geopolitical tensions between the United States and China. An acquisition by Musk, who has close relations with certain governments due to his economic activities (notably in China for Tesla), could exacerbate these tensions. Governments could see this as a strategic takeover, changing the global balance in terms of digital sovereignty. With Meta (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook), the United States is already overpowered, do they need to add TikTok to their digital armada? Even if Musk only buys the American branch of the platform, this will undoubtedly have very serious consequences.
