TikTok yesterday labeled as “pure fiction” a report that China is exploring a potential sale of the video-sharing platform’s US operations to billionaire Elon Musk as the firm faces a US law requiring imminent Chinese divestment.
Citing anonymous people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News had earlier reported that Chinese officials were considering selling the company’s US operations to Musk’s social media platform X.
The report outlined one scenario being discussed in Beijing in which X would purchase TikTok from Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and combine it with the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Photo: AFP
“We cannot be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
The report estimated the value of TikTok’s US operations at US$40 billion to US$50 billion.
Although Musk is ranked as the world’s wealthiest person, Bloomberg said it was not clear how Musk could execute the transaction, or if he would need to sell other assets.
The US Congress passed a law last year that requires ByteDance to sell its wildly popular platform or shut it down. It goes into effect on Sunday — a day before US president-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The US government alleges TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users, and is a conduit to spread propaganda.
China and ByteDance strongly deny the claims.
TikTok has challenged the law, taking an appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Friday last week.
At the hearing, a majority of the conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member bench appeared skeptical of arguments by a lawyer for TikTok that forcing a sale was a violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment free speech rights.
Bloomberg characterized Beijing's consideration of a possible Musk transaction as "still preliminary," saying that Chinese officials have yet to reach a consensus on how to proceed.
Musk is a close ally of Trump and is expected to play an influential role in Washington in the coming four years.
He also runs Tesla Inc, which has a major factory in China and counts the country as one of the automaker's biggest markets.
With TikTok facing an imminent shutdown in the US, American content creators have taken flight — to another Chinese social media app.
Xiaohongshu (小紅書), known as Red Note in English, surged to the top of the Apple App Store downloads on Monday, as users flocked to its Instagram-meets-Pinterest style layout.
That Xiaohongshu's platform is almost entirely in Mandarin seems not to be deterring curious Americans.
TikTok has about 170 million users in the US.
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