US President Donald Trump has expressed his willingness to let South African billionaire Elon Musk — head of Tesla, X and SpaceX — buy Chinese platform TikTok, after he proposed that the United States take 50% and run it as a joint venture with its current Chinese owner, ByteDance.
At a press conference to announce a joint venture to invest in Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, a journalist asked him if he was willing to let Musk buy TikTok, to which he replied affirmatively, as long as “he wanted to buy it.” He also named Oracle co-founder Lawrence Ellison, known as ‘Larry Ellison’, as a possible buyer.
Trump, who has said that TikTok would be “useless” without a permit to operate in the United States, has said that he has met with “the big owners” of the application and has detailed a possible agreement in which the value of this could skyrocket to “a trillion dollars” if it obtained the necessary permits, according to the American television network CNN.
“I met with the owners of TikTok, the big owners. It is worth nothing if it does not get a permit. It is worth about a trillion dollars, so what I am thinking is to tell someone to buy it and give half to the United States, and we will give them the permit,” he explained. As he said, this agreement would make the ‘app’ more valuable by aligning itself with the Government as a strategic partner, ensuring profitability and long-term success.
TikTok is in limbo in the United States after Trump signed an executive order on Monday to allow it to continue operating in the country for 75 days, seeking to lift a ban that came into effect after the Supreme Court upheld a national security law that would penalize app stores and service providers for carrying TikTok unless ByteDance sold it.
