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The TikTok short form video hosting service logo is seen on a mobile device in this illustration photo taken in Warsaw, Poland on 17 July, 2024.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he’d consider the possibility of Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok.

At a press briefing to announce a joint venture for investing in artificial intelligence infrastructure, Trump was asked by a reporter if he was open to “Elon buying TikTok.”

“I would be if he wanted to buy it, yes,” Trump said in response. “I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is in a state of limbo in the U.S. after Trump signed an executive order on Monday to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. for 75 days. That order aims to suspend a ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court last week upheld the validity of a national security law that would penalize app stores and service providers for hosting TikTok unless ByteDance sold it.

Analysts have valued TikTok’s U.S. business at about $50 billion.

Trump said on Tuesday that TikTok would be “worthless” without a permit to operate in the U.S., but could be worth $1 trillion with one.

Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX and owner of social media app X, was one of Trump’s top financial backers in the campaign and is positioned to wield major influence in the administration. Ellison is a longtime Trump supporter, and Oracle is TikTok’s cloud infrastructure provider in the U.S.

“What I’m thinking about saying to somebody is, buy it and give half to the United States of America,” Trump said. “And we’ll give you the permit.'”

Trump said ByteDance would have “the ultimate partner” in the U.S. which would “make it very worthwhile for them in terms of the permits and everything else.”

Trump’s views on TikTok have shifted radically since his first term. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order to ban the app. A federal court viewed his effort as “arbitrary and capricious,” and blocked him. He began to speak more favorably of TikTok after he met in February with billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a major ByteDance investor who also owns a stake in the owner of Truth Social, Trump’s social media app.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., on Monday.

ByteDance has not indicated whether it will sell TikTok, but the Chinese government has reportedly considered a plan that would involve Musk acquiring the operations.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Oracle and TikTok representatives also didn’t provide an immediate comment.

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Kevin O’Leary says he would ‘love to do a TikTok deal,’ but the law prevents it

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Kevin O'Leary says he would 'love to do a TikTok deal,' but the law prevents it

Kevin O’Leary is seen in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on May 28, 2024.

James Devaney | Gc Images | Getty Images

Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary is still interested in a TikTok deal, but it’s not possible under current law, he told CNBC, as President Donald Trump extended the deadline for a ban on the social media platform.

As part of a wave of executive orders on Monday, Trump delayed by 75 days the imposition of a law that would effectively ban TikTok in the U.S., allowing for “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action.” 

Trump had promised the move in a social media post on Sunday, also floating a deal that would see the platform stay active under a joint venture with 50% American ownership. 

“That 50/50 deal, I would love to work with Trump on, so would every other potential buyer … But the problem with some of these ideas is they are inconsistent with the ruling of the Supreme Court,” said O’Leary, widely known from his role in ABC’s “Shark Tank.” 

The investor announced that he, along with “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” an effort led by Project Liberty Founder Frank McCourt, had offered ByteDance $20 billion in cash to buy TikTok in an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”

Speaking to CNBC, he said the proposed deal did not include ByteDance’s TikTok algorithm, which has been a key point of scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, adding that his group had its own alternative. 

TikTok temporarily temporarily went dark in the the U.S. after the Supreme Court upheld the law Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or PAFACA.

McCourt confirmed to CNBC that the Project Liberty team remained “ready to work collaboratively with the Trump Administration, ByteDance, and a consortium of American partners” to finalize a deal and keep TikTok online.

“Project Liberty has a proven tech stack that is already in use and offers a clear path to address the national security concerns of Congress while keeping TikTok operational,” he added.

Legal hurdles

Firms involved with TikTok have had differing reactions to Trump’s executive order. Service providers such as Oracle and Akamai have willingly kept TikTok online, while Apple and Google are yet to restore ByteDance-owned apps on their stores.

According to O’Leary, while Trump’s ban extension has likely lent protection to the likes of Oracle and Akamai, it’s unclear if ByteDance’s deadline to divest will be extended.

“What we need is not really a 75 day extension. What we need is to go back and ask congress to open the order and provide for these new options, because they’re not provided for right now,” he said. 

“I would love to do a deal, if the law provided for it, but I don’t have the luxury of breaching the order of the Congress,” he added.

Bill Ford on TikTok: We can find a workable solution that keeps Chinese & U.S. leadership satisfied

Law experts who spoke to CNBC agreed that the legal status of TikTok and Trump’s executive order remained uncertain and that any efforts to make a TikTok deal could face challenges.

“The Order does not appear to comply with the statute. Congress carefully included certain dates and procedures in the law, which SCOTUS found to be constitutional,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

“Thus, a federal court could find that the Order violates the law and invalidate it,” he said, noting, however, that such an action could take a long time if the government appealed to SCOTUS.

Sarah Kreps, Director at the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, agreed the executive order was not consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, adding that it said nothing about progress toward a qualified divestiture.

Given that violators of the TikTok law could face billions in fines, it’s not entirely prudent for parties to take Trump’s assurances over the law and SCOTUS’s ruling, Kreps said.

“They’re certainly gambling with the law and putting considerable faith in executive authority,” she added.

China softens stance?

O’Leary told CNBC that TikTok could fetch $20-$30 billion on the market in March last year, a huge discount, given any sale would likely exclude the platform’s algorithms.

Instead, the value in a potential deal was the opportunity to gain the strong domestic brand of TikTok and its over 100 million users, he said.

Still, around the time conversations about a TikTok sale ramped up, Beijing was seen as a major barrier to a BytdeDance divestment. 

China, however, recently signaled openness to a deal that would see U.S. companies gain ownership of the platform.

Kevin O'Leary says bidding for TikTok will probably start at $20-30 billion

“When it comes to actions such as the operation and acquisition of businesses, we believe they should be independently decided by companies in accordance with market principles,” a Beijing spokesperson told reporters Monday when asked about President Donald Trump’s proposal. 

According to O’Leary, any potential sale of ByteDance is still expected to be negotiated between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.  

“With TikTok, I have the right to either sell it or close it, and we’ll make that determination and we may have to get an approval from China too,” Trump told reporters following his inauguration.

While signing the executive order, the President reportedly suggested that he could impose tariffs on China if Beijing failed to approve a U.S. deal with TikTok. On Monday stateside, he said he would consider the likelihood of Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

Meanwhile, O’Leary told CNBC that he was in Washington still working on a potential TikTok deal with U.S. lawmakers.  

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Microsoft loses status as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider

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Microsoft loses status as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider

US President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Junichi Miyakawa, chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp., and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced a joint venture to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure worth billions of dollars with the leaders of Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC, and Oracle Corp., an effort aimed at speeding development of the emerging technology.

Aaron Schwartz | Sipa | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI and its principal cloud partner, is losing its designation as exclusive provider of computing capacity for the artificial intelligence startup.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said that it’s still in a favorable position with OpenAI. Going forward, when OpenAI seeks additional capacity, Microsoft will have the “right of first refusal” before OpenAI checks with other parties.

The change in their relationship was disclosed as part of President Donald Trump’s announcement of the Stargate Project, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. Executives from those companies committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be set up as a separate company.

Oracle is a “key initial technology partner” alongside Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia in setting up data center infrastructure, OpenAI said in a blog post.

“The data centers are actually under construction,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said at a press conference at the White House, alongside Trump. “The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is, which is our first location.”

Oracle shares jumped 7% on Tuesday.

In 2019, three years before the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which committed to moving its services to Azure. As OpenAI’s computing needs expanded, Microsoft signed contracts with third-party cloud providers, such as CoreWeave, to supplement its Azure cloud infrastructure.

Oracle entered the mix last year. The database software maker, which trails Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the cloud market, said in June that Microsoft’s Azure AI platform would be extended to Oracle’s cloud.

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it will continue to increase consumption of Azure, and Microsoft said OpenAI recently made “a new, large Azure commitment” for products and model training. Microsoft still has rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, which can go in products such as Copilot. And it still has the exclusive on supplying computing requests for OpenAI’s application programming interface.

But the relationship has shown signs of strain, and Microsoft named OpenAI as a competitor in July. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s big ambitions on a podcast with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley that was released in December.

“What he wants to do, I have to accommodate for, so that he can do what he does,” Nadella said. “And he needs to accommodate for the discipline that we need on our end, given the overall constraints that we may have.”

WATCH: President Trump speaks on AI infrastructure investment

President Trump speaks on AI infrastructure investment

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Nvidia passes Apple again to become world’s most valuable company

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Nvidia passes Apple again to become world's most valuable company

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder, president and CEO, speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2024.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Nvidia passed Apple in market value on Tuesday, once again becoming the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world.

Shares of the chipmaker rose over 1% on Tuesday, and shares are up about 4% so far in 2025 after rising 171% in 2024 and nearly 239% in 2023, reflecting insatiable demand for the company’s artificial intelligence chips.

Meanwhile, Apple shares slid 4% on Tuesday. They’re now down 12% this year after gaining 30% in 2024. The iPhone maker has developed its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features for its phones and laptops, but its business doesn’t have the same level of exposure to the AI boom.

Nvidia has the vast majority of market share for graphics processing units, or GPUs, which have become essential for developing and deploying AI software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While revenue growth has slowed, it still nearly doubled to $35.08 billion in the most recent quarter.

Apple was the first company to reach the $1 trillion, $2 trillion and $3 trillion market cap milestones. Nvidia previously passed Apple in June and then again in November.

On Tuesday, Nvidia had a market cap of about $3.4 trillion, versus Apple at $3.3 trillion.Microsoft is just behind them at $3.2 trillion. A major buyer of Nvidia’s GPUs. Microsoft said earlier this month that it expected to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in fiscal 2025.

In November, Nvidia joined the Dow Industrial Average, replacing Intel, and joining Apple and Microsoft in the blue-chip index.

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Nvidia's outperformance will continue and growth rates will remain higher: Deepwater's Gene Munster

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