U.S. President Donald Trump indicated he would support Elon Musk acquiring TikTok and even suggested a joint ownership structure with the U.S. government on Tuesday.
“I would be, if he wanted to buy it, yes,” Trump said to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, per MacRumors. He made the comments during an event detailing a new AI infrastructure private sector partnership dubbed ‘Project Stargate.”
The project partners include Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI. It aims to build data centres and new AI infrastructure in the U.S. with the aid of the Trump government. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, along with Arm-owner Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, attended the event. Curiously, Twitter owner and apparent Nazi saluting Musk was not present.
Speaking to reporters, Trump suggested a 50-50 ownership split between an acquiring company and the U.S. government. “They’ll have something that’s actually more valuable because they have the ultimate partner,” Trump said.
How did we get here?
Trump’s interest in seeing Musk — or another U.S. billionaire — acquire TikTok shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Although Trump made himself the face of saving TikTok, he was also the one who kickstarted the original attempt to ban the app during his first presidential term. Trump now says he has a “warm spot” in his heart for TikTok and believes he won the youth vote with it.
The Biden administration pushed through on a TikTok ban over national security concerns, with the Supreme Court ultimately upholding the legislation that required Chinese company ByteDance to divest its U.S. TikTok operations. That led to TikTok briefly going dark in the U.S. on January 19th, before coming back with a message thanking Trump for saving the platform. Following Trump’s inauguration, he signed an executive order that paused the ban for 75 days. This puts the Trump administration in a position to try and force a TikTok sale and, knowing how Trump operates, that sale will likely be to someone aligned with Trump.
If that ends up being Musk, well, TikTokers will be in for an awful time — just look at Twitter X. Since Musk acquired the platform, we’ve seen a rise in hate speech, far-right content and misinformation. Musk attacked advertisers for abandoning the platform, broke blocking functionality and laid off hundreds of workers. He has even boosted his own posts into people’s feeds and regularly uses the platform to meddle in political affairs both in the U.S. and abroad.
TikTok is a bigger platform than Twitter/X, boasting around 170 million U.S. users, compared to around 95 million Twitter/X users. Additionally, TikTok is quite popular with young people in the U.S. Should Musk or another Trump-supporting billionaire take control, we could see similar manipulation and enshittification happen on a larger scale.
That being said, TikTok previously denied rumours of a Musk acquisition, calling it “pure fiction.” Of course, things could change — and likely will, now that Trump controls the platform’s future — but this at least suggests TikTok isn’t interested in selling to Musk.
Canada is wrestling with TikTok in its own way right now. The federal government ordered a shutdown of the company’s Canadian offices and TikTok is challenging the order in court. But for the time being, the platform remains available for Canadian users.
Source: MacRumors
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