Elon Musk buying TikTok seems like a stretch — but we're in a weird time, so here's why it could make sense

• Could Elon Musk buy TikTok?
• Several reports say that's what Chinese government officials are contemplating.
• It sure seems like a stretch! And there are lots of downsides. But we're in a weird time where weird deals could become reality.

MuskTok?

I mean, on the one hand — why not? We're already in a world where Mark Zuckerberg is using Donald Trump's election as a reason to change the way Meta maintains its restrooms. (Seriously.)

So why not have Elon Musk swoop in with a deal to buy TikTok from ByteDance, the Chinese company that currently owns it, to get around a law that's meant to ban the service on January 19?

That's what Chinese government officials are pondering, per Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times, meanwhile, reports that China is merely hoping Musk will somehow "broker" a solution.

All the reports convey the sense that all of this is … fluid, at best. All three note that it's unclear how much anyone at TikTok or ByteDance knows about any of this. And Beijing's thoughts about this are "very preliminary and mostly brainstorming," an official tells the FT.

TikTok, for its part, relayed the same statement to me that it provided to other reporters on Monday night: "We can't be expected to comment on pure fiction." Musk didn't respond to my request for comment.

So it's hard to get too worked up about something that seems like it's in the barely-on-the-drawing-board stage.

Still, we are in a world — again — where barely-there ideas have to be taken at least seriously, if not literally. Ask the residents of Greenland.

So, for the record: Elon Musk makes perfect sense as a TikTok owner. He has the capital, the technical capacity, and the political backing to make it happen.

When I suggested this back in March, I also noted that this would be a terrible idea since Musk's track record at Twitter shows what happens when you give him control of a social media platform — he runs it erratically and scares off users and advertisers.

That's all still true.

My hunch, though, is that, unlike Twitter, TikTok would likely weather Musk's ownership much better simply because of its nature: It's a very big video entertainment service, and even if a meaningful number of users leave because they don't like Musk's ownership, many others would stick around because they like being entertained by videos. The same goes for advertisers.

That is: Even a diminished TikTok would certainly be of use to both Musk and many TikTok constituents. And certainly, many of TikTok's 170 million US users would rather use a Musk-owned TikTok — if they even knew who owned it in the first place — than go without a TikTok at all.

I still have many, many questions about how any of this would work in reality.

Starting with this: The law on this one is quite clear. In order to avoid an effective ban by January 19, TikTok needs a new US owner — or, failing that, Joe Biden, who is still the US president, can provide a one-time 90-day extension if there's "significant" progress on a deal, including a "binding legal agreement" to get something done.

So assuming neither thing happens over the next few days — and the Supreme Court upholds the law, as observers seem to think will happen — what would the plan be? Come back days, weeks, or months later with a new law to reverse the old one — even though the last one had overwhelming support from Congress?

But before we get too deep on any of this, let's see what happens in the next few days.