Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said he doesn’t intend to buy TikTok, as American investors are looking to buy the social-media platform from its Chinese parent company after the app faced a short-lived ban.
Musk’s comments came after President Donald Trump extended the congressional ban’s deadline another 75 days in order to facilitate a U.S. sale. The platform, owned by China-based ByteDance, was briefly banned on January 19 until Trump intervened.
Musk, a close ally of Trump, was floated as a potential buyer for TikTok last month. He later denied the possibility, saying he wasn’t interested in the opportunity.
“I have not put in a bid for TikTok,” Musk said via livestream at a conference in Germany late last month. His remarks were made public in a video posted on Saturday, Bloomberg News first reported. “I don’t have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok.”
Musk added he doesn’t use TikTok personally and, therefore, doesn’t know what to do with it. Notably, he acquired Twitter in 2022 before renaming the platform X.
“I’m not chomping at the bit to acquire TikTok,” Musk said, adding he rarely acquires companies. “I usually build companies from scratch.”
While he bought Twitter, which was an existing company, Musk dramatically changed the business by downsizing Twitter’s workforce by about 75 percent and loosening speech restrictions on the platform.
“The reason I acquired Twitter, which is what I said at the time, is that it was important to preserve freedom of speech in America and to the extent we’re legally allowed to in the rest of the world,” the X owner said. “I felt like acquiring Twitter would be an important productive step for the future of humanity.”
“I don’t know if the same logic applies to TikTok.”
Congress initially enforced a ban on TikTok last spring, forcing ByteDance to divest its ownership of the short-form-video app. The Supreme Court then upheld the law, which was passed to protect America’s national security from China. Because it was not sold by the January 19 deadline, TikTok was banned for about twelve hours before Trump stepped in. The move came one day before his inauguration.
Trump then signed an executive order on his first day in office instructing the U.S. attorney general to refrain from enforcing the congressional ban to allow time for ByteDance to hand over TikTok to an American business investor or entity. The president previously pledged he would “save” TikTok from extinction in the U.S.
Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order to establish a U.S. sovereign wealth fund that could play a role in facilitating the sale of TikTok.
Potential buyers for TikTok include Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, YouTuber MrBeast, billionaire Frank McCourt, Microsoft, Oracle, and Rumble. Trump reportedly tapped Vice President JD Vance to broker a deal ahead of its deadline in early April.
When Bloomberg reported Chinese officials were considering Musk as a potential buyer, a TikTok spokesperson told Variety that was “pure fiction.”