https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200804/01445645033/stupid-to-bizarre-trump-demands-that-his-government-should-take-substantial-cut-tiktoks-purchase-fee.shtml

The whole TikTok story keeps getting dumber. While we still believe that the weird moral panic about TikTok is overblown and Trump's threat to ban the company from the US over the weekend is crazy and unconstitutional, people are still taking things seriously. On Friday evening Trump said that he planned to issue an executive order banning the company (which is not quite how any of this works). He didn't actually do this. He also said he was against an American company like Microsoft buying TikTok, which apparently put the ongoing acquisition talks on hold.

Instead, Microsoft had to call up the President and grovel before him, before he apparently told the company it had until September 15th to work out a deal, and if no deal was made by then, he'd again "ban" TikTok (again, an almost certainly unconstitutional move that would not work). Still, it would be a mess, and I'm sure TikTok and ByteDance (the company's current owner) knows that it's probably best to take what it can get from Microsoft while it can. Of course, Microsoft also knows that it's in a good position because ByteDance has a ticking time bomb on its hands, and the value of TikTok could decrease drastically on September 15th if no deal is made. Even if a ban is unconstitutional, fighting it will take time and money.