Elon Musk doesnʼt want to buy TikTok

American billionaire Elon Musk said he is not interested in buying the TikTok app, which the US is trying to ban due to national security concerns.

The billionaireʼs words were reported by Reuters.

Elon Musk said he did not apply to buy TikTok and has no plans to do anything with the application because he does not use it and does not know its format.

“I’m in no rush to buy TikTok, I rarely buy companies,” Musk said, adding that he usually builds companies “from scratch”, and Twitter, which was renamed X, was an exception.

A week ago, Donald Trump said he was in talks with several people about buying TikTok and was going to make a decision on what to do with the app in a month.

Earlier, the American president expressed his willingness to allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy TikTok if he wanted to.

TikTok ban in the US

The US House of Representatives passed a bill in March 2024 that could ban the social network TikTok in the US. The bill was supported by the US Senate in April, and the document was signed into law by former President Joe Biden that same month.

The law took effect on January 19. Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok during his first term as president, but changed his position during this yearʼs presidential campaign and promised to "save" the app.

He explained this by wanting to maintain “competition” with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which he criticized for allegedly censoring right-wing voices. The latter said on January 7 that Meta would work with Trump “to confront governments around the world that are persecuting American companies and increasing censorship”.

In one of his first executive orders since taking office on January 20, the US President Donald Trump postponed the ban on TikTok for 75 days. The new administration has taken the time to determine measures that will protect national security. Before his inauguration, Trump had proposed “reviving” TikTok on the condition that the social network be at least half owned by American investors.

Then the US president said that the American corporation Microsoft was in talks to buy the Chinese application TikTok.

In early February, Trump signed an executive order creating a sovereign wealth fund within a year and said it could potentially buy the TikTok app.

Sovereign wealth funds allow countries that have them to make direct investments using public dollars in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and science. The funds are typically financed by the countryʼs budget surplus. However, the United States runs a deficit. Therefore, the creation of a fund would likely require congressional approval.

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