Is Elon Musk buying TikTok after taking over Twitter?

Hyderabad: A screenshot of a tweet purports to show that Elon Musk has announced from his verified Twitter handle that he will buy the social media app TikTok. The tweet reads, "Now I am going to buy TikTok and delete it haha."

The claim comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter at a whopping $44 billion.

Several social media users shared the tweet or claimed the same in their posts.

Click here, here, here and here to see the posts.

Fact Check

NewsMeter ran a keyword search but did not find any news reports of Elon Musk announcing that he would buy TikTok. Further, we noticed a few glaring discrepancies in the viral screenshots.

1. One screenshot showed that the tweet was from 31 October 2022 from "Twitter for Tesla."

2. The other screenshot showed that the tweet was from 25 April 2022 from "Twitter for iPhone."

3. The 31 October tweet has emojis while the 25 April tweet has no emojis.

We searched for the tweets from both dates on Musk's Twitter page but did not find any such tweets. We also did not find any reports saying that Tesla is one of the third-party services that allow users to post on Twitter.

We also did not find the record of the tweet on the website PolitiTweet which keeps records of deleted tweets by public figures.

Finally, we did an advanced search on Elon Musk mentioning TikTok in his tweets and found he did tweet about TikTok five times but he did not say anything about buying TikTok and then deleting it.

Since there is no evidence to support the claim that Elon Musk is buying TikTok, we can conclude that the viral tweets are fabricated. Hence, the claim is false.