Feb. 8 (UPI) — Elon Musk does not intend to buy TikTok after President Donald Trump recently extended the grace period on a pending ban of the Chinese-owned social media site in the United States.
“I don’t have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok,” Musk said while virtually addressing the WELT Economic Summit in Germany on Jan. 28.
“I don’t acquire things just for economic reasons,” Musk said. “It’s not clear to me what the purpose of acquiring TikTok would be apart from economics.”
Musk said he prefers to build new companies instead of buying existing ones and only bought Twitter, which he renamed X, due to freedom of speech concerns.
TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance, which has been accused of partnering with the Chinese Communist Party and acting as a surveillance and data-gathering source for the Chinese government.
The social media has U.S. assets valued at between $40 billion and $50 billion, CNN Business reported.
Congress and President Joe Biden in 2024 banned TikTok from continuing to provide its popular social media site in the United States and was told to either sell or close operations by Jan. 19 due to national security concerns.
Biden and others have accused TikTok of acting as a means to collect data on U.S. citizens and sharing it with the CCP in China.
TikTok went offline for less than a day before Trump granted a 30-day extension for TikTok to find a U.S.-based partner after he was sworn in on Jan. 20.
Musk’s ownership of X and his close relationship with Trump prompted many to suggest he would be an obvious candidate to buy TikTok.
TikTok owner ByteDance earlier in January said it was “pure fiction” that Musk might become the social media site’s owner in the United States.