WASHINGTON (TNND) — As soon as Wednesday, the Supreme Court could announce its ruling in the case that will decide the future of TikTok in the United States. The justices are expected to uphold a national security law forcing the divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance by Sunday or be banned in the United States.

During oral arguments last week, the court did not appear sympathetic to TikTok's argument the law violates their First Amendment rights. At this point, it's impossible for a sale to be fully executed by the sale deadline but President Joe Biden can extend the deadline if a sale is in progress.

Bloomberg reported China was considering selling the platform to Elon Musk, which TikTok denied. The platform has been staunchly opposed to being spun off. Even if ByteDance were willing, Chinese export controls give the government authority to block the sale of TikTok's algorithm to an American buyer.

Businessman and TV personality Kevin O'Leary is part of a consortium trying to purchase TikTok without its current algorithm.

“It’s Chinese spyware. Pretty well everybody knows that now. And it’s not really an issue around free speech because if they sell it, we’ll keep it lit up and we want to," O'Leary said.

Like the Musk speculation, there's no sign ByteDance has any appetite to sell to O'Leary and his partners either.

Some still have hope TikTok survives. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., announced plans to introduce a bill to extend the divestiture deadline by 270 days.

“Let me be clear: TikTok has its problems. Like every social media platform, TikTok poses a serious risk to the privacy and mental health of our young people. I will continue to hold TikTok accountable for such behavior. However, a TikTok ban would impose serious consequences on millions of Americans who depend on the app for social connections and their economic livelihood. We cannot allow that to happen," Markey said in a statement.

Markey, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rep, Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents Silicon Valley, submitted a joint brief with the Supreme Court arguing the national security law passed last year violates Americans' free speech rights.

“If a page of history is worth a volume of logic, the TikTok ban is ripped from the darkest chapters for First Amendment rights in American history," the brief said.

Already, many have flocked to other Chinese content-sharing platforms like TikTok's sister app Lemon8 and Red Note. However, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't face the same legal fate as TikTok.

For the platform's 170 million users in the United States, life without TikTok can mean many different things.

“This is my income. I’ve built a community on here and I know other people have built a community on here," Riley Mitchell, a creator with more than half a million followers on TikTok said in a recent post.

Unlike other platforms, TikTok allows users who meet certain requirements to earn money from its TikTok Shop and TikTok Affiliate program. If the app goes dark, so do those monetization programs.

The prospect of losing TikTok is particularly bleak for content creators who've invested their time and resources into the platform over others. It's common for a creator to have far more followers on TikTok than they do on Instagram or YouTube Shorts, for instance. Losing TikTok would likely damage deals they've made with brands, another common source of income for online creators.

That's not the case for comedian and creator Matt Buechele, who has about an equal number of followers on TikTok and Instagram: 370,600 and 383,000, respectively.

"Things come and go on the internet all the time. We watched Twitter get destroyed by Elon Musk," Buechele said. “There’s great things on there. I love following the people I follow but it’s like, let’s get over ourselves people. This is not like a shelter or a food bank. It’s an app with people getting hit in the balls with baseball bats.”

But Buechele, who also works as a television writer and has a podcast, does not necessarily support a TikTok ban.

“I’m a comedian who writes jokes for a living and I think for me, it’s like, maybe this is silly to say but everyone’s got every piece of data on me they would ever want: Meta, Apple, Google, TikTok. I don’t care that the Chinese company has it as opposed to the company in Silicon Valley," Buechele said.

Like many, Buechele said it's difficult to imagine the app actually going dark on Sunday. But if it does, he said for him personally, it would be a net positive.

“I think it’ll improve my life if it goes away," Buechele said. "I think I’ll finally finish that play I’ve been wanting to write or I’ll finally read more books.”