TikTok awaited an executive order granting it more time to strike a deal after President Donald Trump returned to power on Monday, as China signaled it would be open to a transaction to keep the app in the U.

GOP Senators are taking a hard line against TikTok and defying President Trump who wants to delay the app from getting banned with Sens. Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham leading the charge

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

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.

The fate of TikTok seems to be sealed for the moment. The Biden administration firmly announced the social media giant would have to look to the Trump administration for help after tomorrow’s ban likely will see the app go dark.

If lawmakers continue to prioritize politically expedient anti-China bans, then they will fail to convince the public they are acting in its best interests.

This looming TikTok ban has over 170 million US TikTok users (who have named themselves "TikTok Refugees") scrambling for a replacement app. And that's what these users have seemingly found in Xiaohongshu or RedNote — a Chinese-owned social media app that has already risen to #1 on the US App Store.

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.

RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, is owned by a Shanghai-based company and raises similar questions as TikTok.

Analysts are predicting that a recent surge of Americans flocking to the Chinese social media platform RedNote - also known as Xiaohongshu - could be short-lived, as users soon find its content regulations differ sharply from those on TikTok US.

President-elect Donald Trump‘s effort to save TikTok after it briefly went dark in the United States is setting his administration up for what could be an early dispute with the China hawks in his own party.