Dax Is Claiming That He Bought TikTok, but Is There Any Truth to the Story?

As the deadline for TikTok's ban comes closer and closer, there are those who are clinging onto every morsel of help they've got. While President Biden and President-elect Trump are both looking at ways to keep the platform active in the U.S., some are looking to the Canadian rapper Dax, who claimed that he has finalized a deal to purchase the platform.

Dax, who has a TikTok following of more than 13 million, claimed in a recent video that he had finalized a deal to buy TikTok and save it from being banned. Here's what we know about whether that's true.

We don't technically know whether Dax is serious about his TikTok purchase, but it doesn't seem possible that he could be. TikTok has been valued at as much as $50 billion, and there's simply no way that Dax has that amount of money. Many of the world's richest men don't have a fortune large enough to buy TikTok and the few that do don't seem all that interested in doing so at the moment.

So is it possible that Dax is secretly Elon Musk's child and therefore has the money to buy TikTok? Sure, but the far likelier explanation is that he made a video that was basically just a joke, and TikTok users who are desperate to make sure the app doesn't disappear took the whole thing a little too seriously. TikTok might not be dead just yet, but it seems highly unlikely that Dax will be the one to save it.

There have been separate reports in mid-January that President Biden, who signed the ban into law, and Donald Trump both don't want the ban to actually happen. President Trump is reportedly considering an executive order that would "preserve" the app but also secure the data of those using it. It's unclear what exactly that means, but maybe time will tell.

“We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data,” Mike Waltz, who will be Trump's national security advisor, said in an interview with Fox News. “I don’t want to get ahead of our executive orders, but we’re going to create this space to put that deal in place.”

An apparent executive order could delay the enforcement of the ban for 60 or 90 days, according to reporting from The Washington Post, per Al Jazeera.

President Biden's team, meanwhile, has said that they should not expect TikTok to suddenly go dark on Sunday when the ban is supposed to take effect. These efforts suggest that there is no desire in either party's leadership to implement the ban, which is odd given that it was a bipartisan bill that Biden himself signed.

For now, then, there is plenty of hope that TikTok could remain in the U.S., although only time will tell exactly what shape things take. What seems clear, though, is that politicians are aware of how unpopular a ban would be with young voters.