Trump’s Truth Social Has Lost $73M Since Launch, New Filing Shows

ZeroCool@feddit.ch to Technology@lemmy.world – 465 points –
Trump’s Truth Social Has Lost $73M Since Launch, New Filing Shows
hollywoodreporter.com
51

I doubt their goal was to make money.

If I owe the bank $1000 that's my problem, if I owe the bank $73,000,000 that's the banks problem.

Not from that anyway, he's parted plenty of his dipshit cult followers from theirs with it though.

Exactly. Socialize the losses via a big faceless corporation, while consolidating the profits via donations. It should honestly be considered embezzlement.

Add it to his list of crimes. Though, fairly likely embezzlement is already on there.

It’s essentially a defederated Mastodon instance. Quite impressive that it can it lose 75 million.

That's the one thing he's good at, losing other peoples money.

One could even say he's the biggest loser.

That honour goes to Elmo.

Call me when Trump loses 30 billion in a year.

I don't talk poorly about Elmo because.. "Elmo knows where you live!" -Simpsons

it might very well be a way to steal these 75m from someone... probably from some morons contributing to his fight to make america great again or something. he is a fraudster after all and it would make total sense.

73 million is so much money I wouldn't know what to do with it in my entire lifetime.

Its ~0.3% of the ~20 billion twitter has lost.

Rich people live in a different universe.

if I had billions I'm sure as hell I wouldn't buy Twitter

I'd disappear into the hedges and nobody would ever know my name.

Fuck that whole ego stroking "hey I've got to start a space tourist business to sell rides to space for other rich narcissist assholes".

Nope, I'd disappear onto my own island or huge land reserve, and have an army of accountants and lawyers to ensure I remain anonymous to the larger public.

The only reason that anyone has that much money is because of a massive personality problem like NPD. Normal people would drop out and enjoy life long before they got to that point.

Which is why you don't have millions!

They’re flawed people.

I would stop at £1M. I’m not going to earn more than that before I die. But free time is far more valuable.

Everybody has different goals, but honestly does anybody even need to pass £10M. Broken hoarders is what they are.

Can someone explain how this website lost millions? Given that this size was not that big, I fail to see how it could cost this much in admin and Server cost. Even some better known commercial shops will hardly hit 5digits in monthly server costs, plus salaries for 1-3 admins and support staff, and maybe advertising costs.

37million sounds like something they pulled out of thin air, maybe for some bookkeeping fraud or tax write off...

Some people gut very lucrative contracts out of it. Some influential public person endorsing this shit heavily? Pay him big money. Really big money. The biggest money ever seen.

Especially since they're just using existing software, they're not even implementing their own…

The classic Trump way, receive investment money and then pay yourself that investment money and more. Take out loans in the company's name and eventually asset strip it to pay yourself again.

You are forgetting how much Trump has to pay Tim Apple. SAD!

Very unfair, but he is looking at it strongly

I've sat for a while meditating on this, and now I come here to share the fruits of my mental labor. The comment I've been working on for hours is: lol

Picture OP in a lab coat and glasses, staring pensively at a blue liquid in an erlenmeyer flask. Behind them is a whiteboard with "LPL LXL L?L" written on it. The world awaits, breath held close as a mother holds her newborn.

Was it meant to make money? I mean, I think it's just basically like old fashioned campaigning materials and propaganda, it's just taking on the new interactive dimensions of social media and the perpetual campaigning of modern politics that Trump particularly is known for. Really it's "profit" would be measured in outcomes rather than dollars, just as ad campaigns track numbers.

73 million for a few years of a defederated Mastodon fork. Yeah, totally not fraud.

Would make a great Russian money laundering front.

Wtf did that money even get spent on? They just used mastodon code, so they needed like one or two coders. Traffic was shit so it can't be that much for hosting.

$23M of the loss is from the first half of this year. There was a $10M regulatory settlement and another $11M spent on "legal investigations", which covers the bulk of that. I don't have the time nor the inclination to really dig into it, but you can look at the filing here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001849635/000119312523276045/d408563ds4a.htm

They lost $50M last year. I haven't looked at that filing so I don't have a clue what they spent that on besides $5M on "legal investigations" in the first half.

This company is a total scam. It's basically a slush fund for Trump. What would probably be more of a bombshell than the spending is where the money is coming from. It's all but guaranteed that it's primarily foreign money. Probably also some rich MAGA wackadoos buying influence.

eh, the next filing will show that it made $200 billion. The one after that will insist that it never existed in the first place.

Their acounts going from the green, heading towards the red. Currently mired with the orange.

This is not really surprising.

Don’t care about him so I didn’t even bother.. but congrats to him! As elons dead bird side lost way more haha

Seems like a low cost way to lock people into your viewpoint. Way cheaper than traditional advertising

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The numbers were revealed in a new financial disclosure from TMTG’s SPAC merger partner Digital World Acquisition Corp.

The filing indicates that, if TMTG is unable to complete the merger with DWAC, and receive the pot of money on the line, it may not survive.

The amended S-4 filing also broke out a number of updates and risk factors related to the company, including the fact that the long-planned streaming video service appears to be off the table for now.

The filing makes no mention of the service (which was teased with conservative comedy specials and “Trump-specific programming”) except in relation to layoffs.

“This action followed a review of all departments, most significantly impacted TMTG’s streaming video on demand (SVOD) and infrastructure teams.”

In May of 2022, Trump agreed to make Truth Social his primary social platform, agreeing not to post on other platforms until 6 hours after he sends a “Truth.” However, since initially signing the deal with TMTG, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and reinstated Trump’s account (he also rebranded it as “X.”)


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This news makes me wanna create an account and set automation to reload over and over just to cost a bit more electricity. But I've got better things to do.