Elon Musk recently made it clear that he is not interested in buying TikTok, the popular social media app. He shared this opinion during an interview at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28, and a video of the interview was released shortly after.
His comments came at a time when there was a lot of discussion around TikTok’s ownership. Former President Donald Trump had put a hold on a law that would have forced TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States. Reports suggested that the Chinese government might be open to selling TikTok to someone like Musk, who is known to be a supporter of Trump. In fact, Trump had expressed that he would like to see either Musk or Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle, take over TikTok. He even signed an executive order to create a special fund that could buy a share of the app.
Despite this, Musk stated very clearly, “I have not put in a bid for TikTok.” He explained that he doesn’t have any specific plans for what he would do if he did own TikTok. He mentioned that if he were to acquire it, he would look into the app’s algorithm—essentially, the set of rules that determines what content users see—and evaluate its effectiveness. He would consider how to make the algorithm more helpful and beneficial to people.
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Musk also admitted that he doesn’t personally use TikTok and isn’t very familiar with how it works. He pointed out that his purchase of Twitter (which he has since renamed X) was unusual for him because he usually prefers to build companies from the ground up rather than buying existing ones.
His remarks about TikTok came about 20 minutes into the interview, which had initially focused on his ideas for improving government efficiency under a potential Trump administration. Musk discussed how he and his allies have gained control of federal agencies and access to sensitive information.
He described the main challenge in improving government as dealing with bureaucracy, which he likened to a tough video game boss. He said that overcoming bureaucracy is one of the hardest things to do, second only to combating chaos and disorder in the system.
