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TikTok is the next stage in Elon Musk’s cultural machinery of reaction

After writing this post in November I started getting preoccupied about the possibility of Elon Musk buying TikTok in the case of an American ban. Looks like the talks about this have now started:

Chinese officials have reportedly held preliminary talks about a potential option to sell TikTok’s operations in the US to the billionaire Elon Musk, should the short-video app be unable to avoid an impending ban.

Beijing officials prefer that TikTok remains under the control of Chinese parent Bytedance, but have discussed other options including a sale to Musk, Bloomberg reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/china-tiktok-sale-elon-musk

Consider what Musk has done to X, which last time I logged in (to delete the account) presented me with an algorithmic timeline largely full of far-right content despite the fact I’m a socialist academic. Now imagine the cultural power which could be wielded by enacting a similar shift on TikTok, given the demographics and the attentional force carried by short-term video.

Elon Musk’s AI startup was valued at $50 billion in December. All content on X is now used for training Grok by default, with widespread speculation that the opt out will be removed in the not too distant future. If the next frontier of GAI will be video models (which tbf I’m entirely sceptical of, but I could see how this could be the next hype cycle) then TikTok would be the most incredible source of training data. Furthermore, could it eventually be integrated into X to constitute the ‘everything app’ Musk has long purportedly been fixated on?

Even if not the cultural power he’s able to exercise through X + TikTok would be incredible, particularly in a climate where regulatory constraints will be near zero. There are marginally more left-wing political influencers on TikTok than right wing ones, but it’s also been a potent mobilising force for far-right movements. If you tweak the algorithm to maximise the visibility of far-right influencers, the organising parameters of a generation disinterested in X would change in the space of a few months.

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