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Elon Musk Wants to Bring Vine Back, but TikTok Reigns Supreme

Elon Musk has engineers looking into Vine’s coding.

He wants them to figure out what it would take to resurrect the now-defunct short-form video platform.

But it may be a hopeless cause because there’s a new big man on campus: TikTok.

TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDanceLtd.) first launched in China in 2016. In November 2017, ByteDance bought Musical.ly for $1B, lurching into the overseas market.

TikTok quickly became the most popular app of 2019 and 2020, and in 2020 the growth skyrocketed, fueled by the pandemic lockdowns.

The social media app was downloaded 693 million times in 2019 and 850 million times in 2020. TikTok generated $4.6 billion in revenue in 2021, a 142% increase year-on-year. By the end of 2022 the app is expected to have 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022.

Vine, by contrast, only ever attracted 30M users.

Musk may consider it a pet project, but the idea that it would compete with TikTok is a Gen Xer’s nostalgic hope.

And a pipe dream. Gen Z has already moved on.



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