After years of rejecting the idea of a sale of TikTok’s US assets to an American buyer in order to avert a ban, China and ByteDance may have found an owner they could live with: Elon Musk.

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is required to sell the app to a U.S.-based buyer or face a nationwide ban.

RedNote, called Xiaohongshu in Chinese — which literally translates as Little Red Book, an apparent reference to former dictator Chairman Mao Zedong — is also required to follow the Chinese Communist Party’s regulations, but has yet to exert its moderation of English language content to meet these standards.

The founder of the app’s parent, Beijing-based ByteDance, met with Elon Musk last year.

The plan to save TikTok involves software company Oracle and a group of outside investors effectively taking control of the app's global operations, two sources with

In his first few days back in office, President Trump is talking about TikTok entirely as a deal making exercise, dropping all of his previously expressed concerns about Chinese influence and American national security.

President Donald Trump downplayed the national security risk posed by TikTok in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, days after offering the social video app a reprieve from legislation that would have forced it to shut down.

State media hailed RedNote's success among American "TikTok refugees" as a repudiation of U.S. government "demonizing" of China's development.

The bizarre surge in popularity for Chinese social media app RedNote has sparked alarm among policy experts who warned it carries even greater security risks than TikTok.

The Trump administration is denying it, but Trump previously said he'd like to see the software company take it over.

Officials at TikTok said they could not be expected to comment on pure fiction when asked about rumors China was looking into having Elon Musk acquire the social media platform.