Trump’s Truth Social may be days away from liquidation

SulaymanF@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 519 points –
washingtonpost.com

When former president Donald Trump’s media start-up announced in October 2021 that it planned to merge with a Miami-based company called Digital World Acquisition, the deal was an instant stock-market hit.


With the $300 million Digital World had already raised from investors, Trump Media & Technology Group, creator of the pro-Trump social network Truth Social, pledged then that the merger would create a tech titan worth $875 million at the start and, depending on the stock’s performance, up to $1.7 billion later.


All they needed was for the merger to close — a process that Digital World, in a July 2021 preliminary prospectus, estimated would happen within 12 to 18 months.

“Everyone asks me why doesn’t someone stand up to Big Tech? Well, we will be soon!” Trump said in a Trump Media statement that month.


Now, almost two years later, the deal faces what could be a catastrophic threat. With the merger stalled for months, Digital World is fast approaching a Sept. 8 deadline for the merger to close and has scheduled a shareholder meeting for Tuesday in hopes of getting enough votes to extend the deadline another year.


If the vote fails, Digital World will be required by law to liquidate and return $300 million to its shareholders, leaving Trump’s company with nothing from the transaction.


For Digital World, it would signal the ultimate financial fall from grace for a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that turned its proximity to the former president into what was once one of the stock market’s hottest trades. Its share price, which peaked in its first hours at $175, has since fallen to about $14.



Digital World’s efforts to merge with Trump Media have been troubled almost from the start, beset by allegations that it began its conversations with the former president’s company before they were permitted under SPAC rules.


Then, in the past year, its issues became more pronounced: Its chief executive was terminated by the board, a former board member was arrested on charges of insider trading, and the company agreed to pay an $18 million settlement to resolve charges that it had misled investors and given false information to the Securities and Exchange Commission.


The merger has “been pretty much unprecedented in terms of all of the glitches,” said Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who studies stock markets. “The deal does seem to be running out of time. You can’t just keep getting extensions forever.”


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Hold on.....

You mean to tell me that a Trump deal was shady from the start, a whole bunch of people involved in it are under investigation and facing criminal charges, and in the end a whole bunch of people are going to lose their shirts and another business will go bankrupt?

Surely you jest! This has never happened with any of Trump's transactions before!!!!!

Good and bad. Good because it is another public failure for Trump. Bad, because those idiots will now flood Twitter / X and reach even more gullible people with their lies.

Elon will be more than delighted to host him. :/

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Everything this guy touches turns to shit. Somehow he escapes himself.

Imagine if the banks, which bailed him out originally, just let him fail way back. Maybe we never would have had this timeline at all...

Have you seen the guy? I'd say he did not, in fact, escape his own Poodas touch.

Isn’t there Kompromat allegedly about him being into that though?

Amazing how he has not been killed by a disgruntled business partner or investor yet

You never heard about all his business failures? The guy is just too full of himself to admit that he ever failed.

What are you talking about? With so many heads like yours in which he lives rent-free, he's the greatest real estate mogul who ever lived!

I'd ask you the same. Then I'd point to the fact others didn't have trouble understanding what I said. I think I've spent more time on this reply than my original comment.

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The investors are all about to receive honorary degrees from Trump University.

Honestly its not asgood of a news because that would mean that the MAGA nuters are just gonn go flocking everywhere else. Thrut social imo was kinda like a containment chamber for those specific types of people, like you wouldnt see a tankie or any one in the liberal spectrum going there, hell probably not even democrats, it was exclusively for the MAGA croud, and no one else. Now we are gonna have a bunch of those nutters back into social media shooting their poison. I just hope they dont get into lemmy.

They'll follow the cult leader back to twitler where they belong.

Hopefully, that will accelerate everyone else moving off of X/Twitter and onto alternatives.

Probably better to have them dispersed rather than concentrated in their own little fission reactor.

This was a sketchy deal from the outset. Why would anyone think a new social media company could be successful. Twitter wasn’t even making a profit when Elon bought it - who would invest $300 million not only to try it again - but to only target less than half the people the other platform targeted.

Just a bad business decision no matter how you slice it.

Twitter became profitable for the first time in 2018 when it reported its first-ever net income of $1.2 billion for that year. This was followed by a second consecutive year of profitability in 2019, with total revenue of $3.4 billion and a net income of $1.4 billion, which was higher than expected by many analysts.

Twitter was making money before Elon bought it... The numbers that get thrown around now about how much money it's losing are because Elon saddled the company with the debt from his leveraged buyout. The insane yet somehow legal strategy of making the company payback the loan for it's own purchase.

This is the least surprising news I’ve heard all day. But it’s very funny!

Watch the users somehow find a way to blame "woke left cancel culture" for this, instead of blaming the man who famously never pays his bills.

Shocking...

Another failed Trump business...

Just shocking...

Whoa, hang on guys. This doesn't mean Truth Social is over, it just means the SPAC deal that was going to take it public might fall through.

If this fails, then they'll need some venture capital to keep running, and if that fails, then it'll be time to shut down.

There's a good chance Putin can scrape together another shell company with some phantom money and promise to pay everything off, thus restarting the clock.

Is there a single word to describe the opposite of shocked?

Nonplussed.

I hate this word because its actual meaning is to be surprised and confused, and people use it more and more often to mean basically the opposite (I assume because the “non” makes “nonplussed” sound like a lack of something), and now the word’s two meanings coexist in opposition of each other, and I just have to use everything else to determine which meaning it is supposed to be.

When people use it a certain way more and more, you can expect that to become the default meaning. When the scenario is people vs dictionary, you can expect the people to win. After all, who writes the dictionary?

My point is that I hate it because we are smack dab in the middle of the transition, where it’s very unsettled which meaning has won out.

I’m neither confused about how a word’s meaning can evolve nor am I arguing that it shouldn’t happen. (In fact, I think language change is very cool.) I just think this word is sitting in a particularly awkward place at this moment in time that makes it very annoying. It’s an aesthetic opinion of sorts.

I only know that word because Archer, but I feel like it doesn't quite capture the "no shit lmao" feels of what I'm going for.

Only in informal usage though. Formally, nonplussed means exactly the opposite as in "surprised and confused." If you want to sound smart/educated, don't use it in the sense of being "unsurprised." Especially outside of North America.

"Common usage" is a thing. Don't be surprised to wind up on the losing side of this battle.

You are 100 percent correct. That said, I don't have to like it.

I am an amateur linguistics nerd and fully embrace the fact that I am often on the losing side of usage.

If it helps you feel better, English is a garbage fire. Literally! Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing! There's no use trying to make this language make sense!

All languages are internally inconsistent and tend to fracture syntax and meaning over time and across space. This is not unique to English and in fact is an inherent concomitant with grammatical and linguistic recursion.

Were this not the case, we'd all be speaking some kind of universal "proto-language" that arose out of our origins as a species in east Africa.

Well Twitter X itself was bleeding capital for years and years, so it makes sense that Truth with largely the same business model would do the same. That business model is just not sustainable

It's primarily a propaganda platform so I think it met it's aims. Trump made all his money there through other businesses, selling NFTs and mugshot merch to chumps.

He can walk away with all those profits and liquidate TS without a worry.

On paper, yes, but it's still a PR loss and not a good look. His followers obviously won't care, but it might tip some people on the fence, so that's a good thing.

Kbin has the best thumbnail replacements for the Washington Post, I swear.
https://kbin.social/media/cache/resolve/entry\_thumb/18/fd/18fd6b8a9aafa39899ffc2dacdd487527833153edb165ee3f903201efbbdea08.png is what we got for this.

If anyone is interested check out The Wandering Inn. I was confused as to how Erin (the main protagonist) related to Trump lol

This looks dope, thanks for sharing! if you wanna rave and ramble about all the ways it's good I'm down to listen! Maybe it will help me convince a friend to start it with me too lol. Or motivate me to stick with it.

It's one of my favorite web serials of all time. Have you ever wanted to read a story and wished it never ended because it's so good? Try the Wandering Inn! Still going strong even after 9 million words. I started it during the Covid lockdown 2 years ago and was enraptured by it for a few months. The story is an isekai (people from our world transported to a different one) in a fantasy world where people gain levels and skills like an RPG. Has inspirations from The Lord of the Rings, DnD, anime, and other nerdy stuff.

I'm so sold!!!! Thank you! And sorry one more question but when you say isekai, it's not in the like male insertion/sexual fantasy way is it? Sorry it can be such a general genre (imo) wanna steer clear of that particular flavor of it lol.

No it is not. The main character is female. And she's just a normal girl before being transported to a different world and becoming an innkeeper. Not a Mary Sue as well but she's really good at chess which is like her main thing.

Following the way the angry cheeto do business it is not a surprise ro anyone that he failed again.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

When former president Donald Trump’s media start-up announced in October 2021 that it planned to merge with a Miami-based company called Digital World Acquisition, the deal was an instant stock-market hit.

For Digital World, it would signal the ultimate financial fall from grace for a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that turned its proximity to the former president into what was once one of the stock market’s hottest trades.

Trump Media has blamed the SEC for the deal’s troubles, saying in a statement last year that the agency had worked to “sabotage” the merger for political reasons with “a bureaucratic black hole of inaction.”

In filings dating back to its September 2021 IPO, Digital World executives said they had not participated in merger discussions with any companies when in fact they’d started speaking with Trump Media leaders months earlier, in violation of federal antifraud guidelines, the SEC said in the statement.

Though Trump Media projected in a 2021 investor presentation that the site would have 41 million total users by the end of this year, usage estimates from Similarweb, a data firm that analyzes web traffic, suggest it is a long way from reaching that goal.

On Aug. 24, after surrendering at an Atlanta jail on felony charges alleging he participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss, Trump posted his first tweet in more than two years, including his mug shot.

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