After years of rejecting the idea of a sale of TikTok’s US assets to an American buyer in order to avert a ban, China and ByteDance may have found an owner they could live with: Elon Musk.

Content creator Jimmy Donaldson, known on the Internet as MrBeast, has made it clear he is interested in buying TikTok. Donaldson has the most subscribers of any user on YouTube— over 340 million—and boasts over 113 million TikTok followers.

Elon Musk has objected to a lack of reciprocity in the US-China tech relationship, a rare criticism from the billionaire on issues sensitive to Beijing after US president-elect Donald Trump prepared to offer a reprieve to TikTok on a ban in the US.

Musk acquired X (then Twitter) in October 2022 after a highly publicized back and forth, in which he gave up on the acquisition midway but ultimately closed the deal, paying $44 billion for the platform. X's user base has been on a decline since the acquisition, and advertising revenues have plummeted.

Elon Musk is finally sharing his thoughts on the TikTok ban. On Saturday night, the app briefly went offline in the United States, months after the

The app, which was set to be banned, now has a bit more time to find a home and address national security issues

The US president has said that if Elon Musk, his right-hand man, wanted TikTok, he'd be willing to facilitate its acquisition. Elon Musk, the world's richest man and head of the US Department of Government Efficiency,

In order to avoid a potential ban in the United States, Chinese officials are considering a contingency plan that would involve selling TikTok's US operations to Elon Musk, said a Bloomberg report. The report further said that the first preference of the Chinese officials will be to keep the short-form video hosting platform under the control of parent company ByteDance,