Elon Musk won’t save TikTok

THE idea of Elon Musk as a potential buyer for TikTok may seem like the craziest development yet in the saga of the US government’s determination to ban the app. But it’s not as out-of-left-field as it sounds, and would carry its own potential harms.

The world’s wealthiest man has long said that he hopes to create an “everything app”, and incorporating TikTok into X, formerly Twitter, would take him a step towards that goal. It could also offer a potential gold mine of training content for his artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI. And as a close ally of incoming president Donald Trump, who campaigned to save the app, it’s less surprising that his name came up as part of potential deal-making with Beijing. TikTok has all but exhausted its legal avenues to overturn the law that would ban the platform in the United States if it isn’t sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

TikTok is fighting for its future in the US as the threat of Chinese cyber espionage has emerged as a sensitive issue in Washington. The US Treasury Department said last month that it was hacked by a Beijing state-sponsored actor, just days after the White House disclosed that nine telecommunications firms had been breached by a Chinese group. Before the Supreme Court last Friday (Jan 10), the representative for the US government referenced these attacks, saying that China has a “voracious appetite to get its hands on as much information about Americans as possible”.