Elon Musk is not interested in buying video-sharing platform TikTok, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said during a virtual meeting at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28.
“I’ve not put in a bid for TikTok and I don’t have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok,” Musk said in a video released online Saturday by The WELT Group, which is owned by German media company Axel Springer.
The Chinese-owned app, which has about 170 million monthly American users, was set to be banned on January 20 due to national security concerns. President Donald Trump gave ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, a last-minute lifeline by delaying the ban for 75 days. The extension has given TikTok more time to find a non-Chinese buyer, a condition in the bill signed by former President Joe Biden last April.
ByteDance has said it doesn’t have plans to sell, though some investors have publicly stated they are interested.
YouTube and TikTok influencer MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, posted in January that he intended to buy the app. “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt are also among a group of billionaires who have expressed interest.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was thought to be a potential bidder.
In 2022, Musk completed a $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, which he has since renamed X. But Musk says he’s not one to acquire companies, calling it “highly unusual.”
He said that acquiring Twitter was because it was “important to preserve freedom of speech in America,” and that he’s not sure “if the same logic applies to TikTok.”
“I don’t acquire things just for economic reasons. It’s not clear to me what the purpose of acquiring TikTok would be apart from economics,” he added.
TikTok’s US assets, without the algorithm, are estimated to be worth between $40 billion and $50 billion, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.
But much of the app’s value may lie in the algorithm, making it difficult to put a dollar figure on it. The first step for any buyer, as Musk acknowledged, would be to look at TikTok’s algorithm, which impacts users’ experience.
Musk said that if he were to look at the algorithm, he would decide “how harmful or useful is this algorithm.”
Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
CNN’s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
