This follows reports that Chinese officials were considering selling the company’s US operations to Musk’s social media platform X.
TikTok has reacted to a report that China is exploring a potential sale of the video-sharing platform’s US operations to billionaire Elon Musk.
Tiktok said such a claim is pure fiction.
This is as the firm faces an American law requiring imminent Chinese divestment.
Bloomberg News, while citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, had earlier reported that Chinese officials were considering selling the company’s US operations to Musk’s social media platform X.
The report highlighted one scenario being discussed in Beijing, where X would purchase TikTok from its Chinese owner ByteDance and combine it with the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“We cannot be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
The report estimated the value of TikTok’s US operations at between $40 billion and $50 billion.
Although Musk is currently ranked as the world’s wealthiest person, Bloomberg said it was not clear how Musk could execute the transaction or if he would need to sell other assets.
Recall that the US Congress passed a law last year requiring ByteDance to either sell its wildly popular platform or shut it down.
The US government alleges that TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users, and is a conduit for spreading propaganda.
However, China and ByteDance strongly deny the claims.
TikTok has challenged the law, taking an appeal to the US Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Friday.
At the hearing, a majority of both conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member bench appeared skeptical of arguments by a lawyer for TikTok that forcing a sale violated First Amendment free speech rights.