Elon Musk recently said he is “not chomping at the bit to acquire TikTok.”
Musk made those remarks during an interview at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28. A video of the interview was published today.
The interview came after President Donald Trump delayed a law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it banned in the United States. At the time, there were reports that the Chinese government was open to a deal in which Musk (a key Trump ally) would acquire the app. Trump even told reporters that he’d like to see Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison acquire TikTok; he’s also signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund that could purchase a stake in the app.
But Musk claimed that he wasn’t interested, flatly stating, “I have not put in a bid for TikTok.”
“I don’t have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok,” he said in the interview. “I guess I would look at the algorithm and try to decide: How helpful or useful is this algorithm? And what can we do to shift the algorithm to be more productive and ultimately be beneficial to humanity?”
He added that he doesn’t “use TikTok personally” and is “not that familiar with it.” And he described his acquisition of Twitter (now X) as an anomaly in his career: “I usually build companies from scratch.”
Musk’s comments on TikTok came nearly 20 minutes into the interview, which initially focused on his plans for his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Trump administration. Musk and his allies have subsequently taken control of federal agencies and gained access to large troves of sensitive data.
“With respect to government, really the challenge is overcoming bureaucracy,” he said. “I think bureaucracy is perhaps the penultimate boss battle. The ultimate boss battle is defeating entropy … The second hardest battle is defeating bureaucracy. That’s how difficult it is to improve government.”