The Chinese government is considering a plan for Elon Musk to acquire TikTok’s U.S. business, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
Chinese officials are in preliminary talks about a potential option to sell TikTok's operations in the United States to billionaire Elon Musk, should the short-video app be unable to avoid an impending ban, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
Under one scenario, Musk's social media platform X would take control of TikTok U.S. and run the business together, the report said. Officials have yet to reach a consensus about how to proceed, according to Bloomberg News.
Last week, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold a law that would force a sale or ban TikTok in the U.S by Jan. 19, over national security concerns about China.
Beijing officials prefer that TikTok remains under the control of parent Bytedance, the report said, citing sources.
According to Bloomberg, with more than 170 million users in the US, TikTok could bolster X’s efforts to attract advertisers. Musk also founded a separate artificial intelligence company, xAI, that could benefit from the huge amounts of data generated from TikTok.
It remains unclear how much ByteDance is aware of the discussions, or of Musk and TikTok's involvement, and there is no information on whether ByteDance, TikTok and Musk have engaged in any talks regarding a possible deal.
The potential acquisition of TikTok by Elon Musk could have significant implications for competition across various markets, from digital and advertising to artificial intelligence. Possible issues related to the hypothetical merger of different digital ecosystems were discussed by experts from the International BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre at the BRICS+ Digital Competition Forum in Brazil in 2022.
The Centre’s experts conducted a case study modeling the merger of Musk's business empire with Chinese tech giant ByteDance. As noted by BRICS Centre’s Director Alexey Ivanov, such a merger would impact the interests of BRICS countries, especially considering that India and Brazil account for a significant portion of the user base of Musk's social media platform X, which he has positioned as a "common digital town square" for free speech.
In BRICS countries, TikTok is already in active competition with local platforms. The merger of the TikTok and X ecosystems could lead to data concentration and market dominance, raising concerns among local regulators.
During the discussion of the proposed deal, the experts addressed various problems of international cooperation among the BRICS regulators and discussed the likely negative consequences of the deal as well as possible remedies and corrective measures by the competition authorities.
In recent years, BRICS countries have been actively discussing ways to strengthen cooperation in cross-border mergers analysis. A first step could be the development of a digital tool — "Merger Radar" — designed to help BRICS antitrust agencies identify priority and problematic deals.
“We hope that by the next BRICS competition conference, scheduled for September 2025 in Cape Town, we will make progress on this initiative. Perhaps we’ll be able to present some elements of this platform for approval by antitrust regulators or even agree on its full-scale launch,”
said Alexey Ivanov in an interview with TASS.