Is Elon Musk taking over another major social media platform?

NEW YORK: China's officials are exploring a potential sale of US TikTok operations to billionaire Elon Musk as the video-sharing platform faces an American law requiring imminent Chinese divestment, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

The report, which is citing anonymous people familiar with the matter, outlined one scenario being discussed in Beijing where Musk's social media company X would purchase TikTok from Chinese owner ByteDance and combine it into the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The report estimated the value of TikTok's US operations at between $40 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.

The US government passed a law last year that requires TikTok's ByteDance to either sell the wildly popular platform or shut it down. It goes into effect Sunday — a day before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The US government alleges TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users and is a conduit to spread propaganda. China and ByteDance strongly deny the claims.

TikTok has challenged the law, taking an appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Friday.

At the hearing, a majority of the conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member bench appeared sceptical of arguments by a lawyer for TikTok that forcing a sale was a violation of First Amendment free speech rights.

Bloomberg characterised Beijing's consideration of a possible Musk transaction as "still preliminary," noting that Chinese officials have yet to reach a consensus on how to proceed.

It said it was not clear how much ByteDance knew of the Chinese government planning.

TikTok did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment, but a representative was cited by Variety as saying: "We can't be expected to comment on pure fiction."

Musk is a close ally to Trump who is expected to play an influential role in Washington in the coming four years.

He also runs electric car company Tesla, which has a major factory in China and counts the country as one of the automaker's biggest markets.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to enact new tariffs on Chinese goods, which would expand a trade war begun in his first term and which was largely upheld, and in some cases supplemented, by outgoing President Joe Biden.