Washington: Billionaire Elon Musk has confirmed that he has no plans to buy Tiktok, the popular short-video app at the center of an American national security debate because of its Chinese ownership during urban dancing.
Musk’s comments made in late January were released online on Saturday by Welt Group, part of the German media company Axel Springer Se, which hosted a summit where the Tesla manager joined the conference via video.
“I haven’t made a bid for Tiktok,” Musk said a week after US President Donald Trump said he was open to Musk who bought the bytedance-owned app if he wanted to do so.
“I don’t have any plans for what I would do if I had Tiktok,” Musk said, adding that he wasn’t using the short video app in person and wasn’t familiar with the app’s format.
“I’m not chomping on bit to acquire Tiktok, I don’t acquire businesses in general, it’s pretty rare,” Musk said, adding that his acquisition of billions of dollars of social media platform twitter, now called X, was unusual.
“I usually build companies from scratch,” Musk said.
The Republican President signed an executive order that tried to postpone the enforcement of a ban on the popular Short-Video app scheduled to be closed on January 19.
Bytance got the deadline for January to sell the US assets in Tiktok or face a US ban on legislators’ concerns that the app poses national security risks because China could force the company to share the data from its US users. Tiktok has denied that it has or would ever share US user data.
Apple and Google have not reintroduced Tiktok to their app stores since a US law came into force. Tiktok said on Friday that it gave us Android users the opportunity to download and connect to the app via package kits on its website in an attempt to bypass restrictions on the popular platform in the country.
Trump has said he was in conversations with several people about Tikkok’s purchase and would probably have a decision on the future of the app this month. It has about 170 million US users.
This week, the president signed an executive order to set up a superb wealth fund within the year and said it could potentially buy Tiktok.
Bytedance has previously denied any plans to sell Tiktok.
Trump, who saves Tiktok, represents a reversal in attitude from his first term of office as he tried unsuccessfully to ban the app relating to the company sharing Americans’ personal information with the Chinese government.
Recently, Trump has said he has “a warm place in my heart for Tiktok” that credit the app by helping him win young voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Bytance and Tiktok did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of regular opening hours.
