BarcelonaChinese government officials are holding preliminary talks about selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to tycoon Elon Musk, with the goal of sidestepping the country’s veto of the short-form video app, Bloomberg News has reported. and collected by the Reuters agency. Although the Beijing executive would prefer that the control of TikTok remained in the hands of its parent ByteDance, it continues to look for solutions to avoid the ban.
The Chinese government owns a “golden stake” in the company that gives it veto power, raising suspicions from several members of the US Congress about how much power Xi Jinping’s administration really has in the platform “We cannot be expected to comment on pure fiction,” was the response of a TikTok spokesperson regarding the hypothetical sale of the American subsidiary to Musk.
If the US Supreme Court does not prevent it, TikTok will have to stop its operations in this market this Sunday, January 19, just one day before Donald Trump returns to the presidency. A regulation approved by the US Congress last April, which was supported by both Democrats and Republicans, and which gave ByteDance nine months to find an investor from a country that was not considered an “adversary” of the United States .
Lawmakers then justified this decision by arguing that the platform represents a threat to national security, due to the possibility of the Chinese government accessing the data of its users. For its part, China has repeatedly criticized the US’s “crackdown” on TikTok and has asserted that it is an “intimidation tactic” that will eventually backfire on the US administration itself.
What does Trump think?
Although in his first term Trump tried to ban the Asian social network, this time he has asked the US Supreme Court to paralyze the entry into force of this law until he is president, after promising during the campaign that “he would save TikTok”. Musk, who has become one of his closest allies, has significant interests in China, where the main production base of his electric vehicle firm Tesla is located. The South African tycoon already defended in April that TikTok should not be banned in the US, as such a decision would go “against freedom of expression”.
Source: www.ara.cat
