Elon Musk recently said that he “is not chewing to acquire Tiktok.”
Musk made those comments during an interview on the Welt Economic Summit on January 28. Video of the interview was published today.
The interview came after President Donald Trump delayed a law that obliged the parent company bytedance to sell or to be banned in the United States. At the time there were reports that the Chinese government was open for a deal in which Musk (an important Trump bondmate) would acquire the app. Trump even told reporters that he would like to see Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison buy Tiktok; He has also signed an executive order to set up a sovereign wealth fund that could buy an interest in the app.
But Musk claimed that he was not interested and said flat: “I didn’t make a bid for ticktok.”
“I have no plans for what I would do if I had Tiktok,” he said in the interview. “I think I would look at the algorithm and try to decide: how useful or useful is this algorithm? And what can we do to move the algorithm to be more productive and ultimately favorable for humanity? “
He added that he did not use “Tiktok personally” and is “not so well known.” And he described his acquisition of Twitter (now X) as an anomaly in his career: “I usually build companies all over again.”
Musk’s comments about Tiktok came almost 20 minutes after the interview, which initially focused on his plans for his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) under the Trump government. Musk and his allies then took over control of federal agencies and gained access to large points of sensitive data.
“As far as the government is concerned, the challenge is really overcoming bureaucracy,” he said. “I think bureaucracy might be the penultimate boss. The Ultimate Boss Battle is the beating of entropy … The second most difficult battle is to defeat bureaucracy. That is how difficult it is to improve the government. “