If it did happen, could Elon afford it? Surely TikTok is much more valuable than Twitter, right? Musk could barely scrounge enough backing and had to put up his Tesla shares as collateral to get enough cash for the Twitter purchase.
The question isn't about affording it, the questions is why China would give up such a valuable Intel gathering and propaganda tool? They wouldn't sell it for all the tea in China.
Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for 44 billion, and he was overpaying.
For TikTok's American component, its price could be $100 billion, according to BBC and CBS or even $180 billion according to the Financial Times. Although a forced sale would definitely decrease the value (and that value includes TikTok's proprietary algorithms which aren't a given) it is definitely worth more than Twitter, even 2022 Twitter
Back in 2006 I had a website for a comedy project I was working on at the time. I had a menu on the side of the page. The menu was a whiskey bottle. Each of the links was 2 images. When you didn't hover your mouse over it, it was a tan background with a black text (to immitate the look of a Jack Danials bottle), but when you hovered over any text, the black text turned blue. So signify "you're highlighting this option".
I needed some text with limited amount of space to link to socialmedia.htm All the page did was link to the facebook, the myspace, and the twitter of the group. So I did the best logical thing. I made the text say "MyTwitFace". Which still makes me laugh, although it no longer makes sense.