Summary
China is reportedly considering selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to Elon Musk if the company cannot avoid a potential U.S. ban, Bloomberg reports.
Officials prefer TikTok to remain under parent ByteDance but acknowledge the possibility of a forced sale or government-arranged deal.
One proposal involves Musk’s platform X co-managing TikTok U.S. Beijing’s “golden share” in ByteDance has raised national security concerns in the U.S., with a Supreme Court ruling on a TikTok ban or sale expected by January 19.
Neither TikTok nor Musk confirmed any negotiations.
Wait I thought the ByteDance CEO said they weren’t Chinese but Singaporean.
Also having Elmo own both Twitter and TikTok would be fucked.
CEO is Singaporean (and according to the BBC article I mentioned in my other comment, he says this report of a sale is “pure fiction”). China has some people on the board though. Not sure what to believe here.
It doesn’t matter what country the CEO is from. The company is currently controlled by China, and can’t be compelled to obey US laws.
US is also late to the party: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok
Most telling thing is that even though this is a Chinese product, China itself bans it, and instead uses its own version of TikTok.