Chinese officials are in preliminary talks about a potential sale of TikTok’s United States (US) operations to billionaire Elon Musk, Bloomberg News reported Monday.
This decision is being considered due to the possible upcoming ban of TikTok in the US, which the US Supreme Court should officially rule on by January 19, 2025. In April last year, the US Senate passed a bill that would ban the popular platform TikTok in the US if the company’s owner, Chinese tech firm ByteDance, doesn’t sell the company.
The law is set to take effect on January 19, unless the Supreme Court rules to prevent it.
On Friday, January 10, the Supreme Court heard arguments in TikTok’s appeal, which seeks to block the law. TikTok and ByteDance argued that the law violates the First Amendment rights of 170 million users in the US. However, according to Variety, the judges are more inclined to support the government’s position — that TikTok poses a threat to national security because the company is owned by the Chinese government.
According to Reuters, the Chinese government owns a major stake in the company, which some members of the US Congress have said gives the Chinese government influence over TikTok in the US.
Regarding the report that Elon Musk could take over TikTok in the US, TikTok told Variety that it was pure fiction and that they could not comment on it. Bloomberg reports that according to China’s export rules, Chinese companies are unable to make sales without government approval, making any eventual sale of TikTok dependent on the Chinese government.
The Chinese government has previously condemned US attempts to ban TikTok, but according to Bloomberg, Beijing officials see the TikTok talks as a potential way to reach a reconciliation with US authorities. They also believe that selling to Musk, as one of Donald Trump’s closest allies, is very attractive for this reason.
The media write that for now it is not clear how much ByteDance is aware of the Chinese government’s discussions and whether TikTok and Musk are directly involved in their negotiations.
Bloomberg also reported that the value of TikTok is estimated at around 40 to 50 billion dollars, which is a large amount even for Musk. We remind you that Musk paid 44 billion dollars to social network X in 2022 and that he is still paying off large loans for that.
By taking over TikTok, Musk would acquire an additional 170 million users of the social network in the US and billions in potential advertising revenue on TikTok. Bloomberg also writes that Musk has founded a special company for artificial intelligence, xAI, which could benefit from the large amount of data generated by TikTok.
President-elect Trump, who takes office on January 20, has, according to Bloomberg, sought to delay the TikTok ban so he could work on negotiations. He said he wanted to “save” the app, and there were rumors that he might take last-minute measures to circumvent the ban on the app in the US.
Source: Media.ba
Photo: Pixabay
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