(Yicai) Feb. 10 -- Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and chief executive of US auto giant Tesla, has stated for the first time that he is not interested in acquiring the US business of short-video platform TikTok from its Chinese owner ByteDance.

"I haven't put in a bid for TikTok and I don't have any plans for what will I do if I had Tiktok," Musk said during a video call at the WELT Economic Summit held in Germany on Jan. 28 and released by The WELT Group on Feb. 8. "I don't use TikTok personally, so I am not that familiar with it."

Previously, US President Donald Trump expressed his willingness to let Musk buy TikTok if he wanted to.

"I usually build companies from scratch," Musk noted, adding that the expectation with acquiring X, formally Twitter, was to "preserve freedom of speech in America and to the extent we are legally allowed to in the rest of the world."

The future of TikTok in the US, which was banned for less than a day on Jan. 19 due to national security concerns, remains uncertain. The government continues to demand that ByteDance sell or divest the platform or get banned, while the Beijing-based firm previously denied plans to sell.

Trump recently said he is in talks with multiple parties regarding the acquisition of TikTok and may make a decision about the app's future later this month. The US president inked an executive order to establish a sovereign wealth fund within the year, with experts anticipating that this fund might buy the platform.

Trump is committed to working with TikTok to seek a solution that ensures the possibility of its legal operation in the US, CEO Shou Zi Chew, who attended the presidential inauguration, said last month. The platform has around 170 million users in the country.

Editor: Martin Kadiev