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China Weighs Selling TikTok to Trump Ally Elon Musk
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- 00:00Where has this narrative come from that Chinese officials, not bytedance, but Chinese officials, might think that Elon Musk could be a good owner of this key social media company? Well, from what our sources tell us, they have been evaluating the potential options for TED talks should the band go through, which it looks like based on the Supreme Court arguments and how that went, that it’s very likely that that will we will see the law be enacted. Elon Musk appealed to the Chinese government because he already has experience dealing with businesses in China through Tesla. He has a longstanding relationship with that country. The thing I want to I want to give pause here on this is the Chinese government, the idea, the whole point of this entire exercise of, you know, trying to disentangle Tik Tok from its ownership was to reduce the links to China. So would they really go with the US government, really go with a solution that involves somebody that is expected to be friendly with China? Well, maybe it won’t matter because of Elon Musk’s close ties to Donald Trump, which is how the Chinese government is also seeing as a positive, according to our sources. He he has been at Trump’s side day in and day out. He gave more than 250 million in support of his campaign. So it’s this really complicated web of, you know, we’re trying to get the US government is trying to get this app out of connection to the Chinese government. And the Chinese government has a say in how that happens. And because of the Tik Tok algorithm. So it’s getting very complicated very fast. Sarah, back to Elon Musk. But more from the perspective of him as a social media platform owner already. How would acquiring Tick Tock work for him? Is this something he has floated before or thought about before? And how would he come up with the financing to? It would be a pretty expensive purchase. Well, it would be it would be relatively insane to do this. I mean, he just thought, Tick tock. Sorry, guys. Excuse me. He just bought Twitter for 44 billion in 2022 and he’s still paying off those loans. So he’s not very likely. He’s the richest man in the world, but his his money is not very accessible to him. And if you were to buy tick tock or propose such a thing, it would certainly cost many billions. We don’t we don’t know exactly how much, but some estimates put it around 40 to 50 billion for tick tock us. It could it could be a different price depending on the diplomatic interest in that kind of a deal. We don’t know yet if tick tock if it would be sold which you know, nobody’s talking about just yet in the company, if it would be sold, then it wouldn’t happen in a competitive process Or would it be more of a diplomatic arrangement between China and the US and the company and whoever wants to buy it? So some people are already working on it. I know Frank McCourt was on your show last week with Kevin O’Leary. They have a bid. So it is it is something that could be an Elon Musk financing situation, but it could also not even get to that point. Briefly, Sarah, the irony of all of this is some of the Chinese owned social media companies are doing really rather well. People are moving off from TikTok potentially to buy new homes. And you go to Apple’s App store. What’s trending? The top apps are from China. And I think that this is this is just indicating that the US consumer is already embracing multiple Chinese apps. There’s Sheahan, there’s Teemu, there’s there’s a lot of, you know, nascent social apps that are that are booming right now. And so I think that this is this is going to be a Whac-A-Mole problem. One of the solutions to the Tik Tok potential ban could be that they just rename a new one.