Trump's Truth Social Is Worth $10 Billion. Here's Why

inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – -54 points –
Trump's Truth Social Is Worth $10 Billion. Here's Why
forbes.com
41

That article is a shit opinion piece and I'm shocked Forbes ran it. There's no explanation for this random valuation other than other platforms are worth $X.

Here's an interview with a senior editor at Forbes who has quite a different take https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-truth-socials-stock-price-soared-despite-company-reporting-49m-loss-last-year

Forbes "contributors" are bloggers. Forbes gave up on actual journalism years ago and is coasting on the reputation of the brand.

After voicing similar surprise with Forbes before, I was told anything published under Forbes dot com slash sites is just content they’re rehosting.

Not sure if it’s true, but I definitely take anything from them with a grain of salt now. Also it seems most if not all Forbes stories I see linked are under /sites/…

If they attach their name to it and don't make it abundantly clear it is an external opinion that in no way reflects on their views, their credibility takes the same hit as if their senior editors personally put the article out.

I've heard the "that isn't them, they're just rehosting" commentary. They aren't Facebook. If they publish it with their name, it's theirs. If they want to burn their credibility for that, it's on them.

Right. If I had read "opinion" I'd understand. This says "contributor" which is where my amazement comes from.

Oooh! Now I see. You have to hover over the ( i )

Oh FFS:

Literally you're link, which I also listened to this morning:

Now, you have the latest iteration of this, where he's going back to the public markets, now capitalizing on his political supporters who want to be in business with him and also just on people who like trading meme stocks. Some people like going to the casino. Other people like trading meme stocks and just seeing what's going to happen.

These are not people who are going to be carefully looking at the financials and figuring out, OK, does this valuation make sense? And do I think that this company is going to be profitable enough to justify my investment? By and large, these are people who just say, hey, I want to be in business with Donald Trump and here's my opportunity to do so.

And from Forbes article:

"This steadfast user base not only ensures consistent engagement and data generation but also stabilizes the platform's revenue streams through targeted advertising and potential subscription services," said Matthews. “Moreover, the direct association with a polarizing figure such as Trump amplifies the platform's visibility and influence within certain segments of the political and social spectrum, further enhancing its value."

Therefore, the combination of a loyal user base, the potential for targeted advertising, strategic partnerships, and the platform's role in the broader media and political discourse all contribute to its valuation.

"These factors underscore not only Truth Social's worth but also illustrate the broader dynamics that underpin the valuation of social media platforms," Matthews continued, "where user engagement, data monetization and the capacity to influence public discourse are pivotal."

They both agree that part of this rise is due to his crazy ass base and also they are both "shit opinion pieces" as you put it. I swear to god, lemmy users are just as shit as redditors way too often now and end of the day, he's did get richer due to this IPO and his shady business dealing with his shit truth social.

I fail to see your point.

The headline is: "Here's why Truth Social is worth $10 Billion". I'm going in looking for a reasonable explanation as to why it's worth ten billion dollars.

This opinion piece essentially says it's the "unwavering loyalty" of its "steadfast" 9 or 5 million (depending on the article) users. That doesn't tell me anything about the valuation. Is it the case that any business with millions of users is worth billions of dollars? We know they've lost $49 million, what's their revenue? There's nothing tangible in this article to explain the $10 billion valuation. It has not answered the question I had going into it. I mean, to put it another way, the best source this piece has is "CampusExplorerdotcom". This isn't compelling me to invest in the company.

The other report is more realistic and offers the explanation of the soaring stock price due to it being both a meme stock and an opportunity for people to be "business partners" with Trump. It opens with the objective observation that its valuation does not match with its financials. This at least informs me that the valuation is not based on finances but on excitement. This is a realistic assessment from someone who has been reporting on Trump's ventures for years.

My initial comment was more in response to the presentation of the article being a legit report by Forbes and calling it out as an opinion. What I've learned since my original post is that this is in fact tagged as an opinion piece if you hover of the ( i ) next to Contributor. I'm not so sure opinions should be considered "News".

Fair enough. Perhaps this is the wrong article to post but I do honestly think that Truth Social, a company mired in shenanigans, which The Daily covers quite nicely btw, rockets up to this absurd valuation is news especially in conjunction with all of the other news about Trump and owing half a billion dollars.

But sure, I get your point.

Both sides-ism.

Edit: Sorry, do you downvoters think that Forbes isn't trying to do the "both sides" bullshit?

More proof that the stock market is based on people believing in magic.

I stopped believing the stock market meant anything ever since computerized high-frequency trading became a thing.

HFT is about faster price discovery and often is just arbitrage between exchanges.

If the New York Stock Exchange price of AAPL is $1 more than the Chicago Exchange, then a HFT detects that and buys the Chicago Exchange's AAPL + sells NYSE AAPL, bringing price discovery to the masses.

That's why HFT is, in practice, allowed. Because the vast, vast, vast majority of HFT is important arbitrage between our collection of exchanges in the USA.


These "dumb" price differences need to be fixed, and it makes sense for the people who discover these differences to profit from them. It also provably makes the markets smoother and better for everyone involved. (New York can know that the price changes over in Chicago will affect them within milliseconds, keeping all the exchanges across the country nearly in sync).

That may be how it is now. AI will be employed to make stock trades independently very soon if it hasn't started yet.

Have you even used ChatGPT? Its slow as fuck.

HFT is trading within milliseconds. Not trading within dozens-of-seconds.

That is because you are relying on connecting to their servers rather than having your own extremely powerful ones.

Also, this would be a completely different sort of AI than a glorified chatbot.

Also, this would be a completely different sort of AI than a glorified chatbot.

Uh huh. So you're just spitballing I take it.

Name the algorithm. What's the AI algorithm that's about to take over the high frequency trading world? A .pdf or citation to a journal would also be nice, something that explains why this new hypothetical algorithm you're talking about is better than the HFT / Arbitrage that I talked about earlier.

Yes, of course I'm spitballing. Because I said it likely hasn't happened yet. I'm not sure why you would expect me to name the algorithm for something that hasn't happened yet.

Are you under the impression that it's not possible?

Yes. People have been trying to use AI as a statistical method for making money for literally fucking decades. Neural nets, genetic algorithms, statistical sampling, etc. etc. etc.

All you end up making 99% of the time is a volatility and/or momentum bot. Either a bot that makes tons of money when the stocks are predictable, or a bot that makes tons of money when stocks have wild unpredictable swings. When the opposite happens (ex: volatility is less than expected, or greater than expected), the bots collapse and you lose like $10 million bucks and everyone shuts down the bot. Every single time.

Its not even clear how you're supposed to "test" a trading bot. Everyone's got ridiculous ideas and "new AI" algorithms that try every few weeks, and they all fail before the unpredictability that is the market.

And then it turns out that you could have traded on volatility by just buying VIX and holding it anyway. So if you want a glorified volatility trader, there's easier ways to do so than spending $millions on developers and $millions on computers and hooking it up to a $100-million bank account and praying for the best.

Just put the $100 million into VIX (or short-VIX) and bam. You roughly accomplish the same thing except it didn't cost you $million developers or $million computers.


The stuff that makes money are like, Black Scholes differential equations (which are extremely fast. No "AI' here, just numerical methods that directly compute a price). Of course, Bvlack Scholes is what they teach in college so everyone knows it. The secret sauce is the stuff that all the firms add to their computers and keep literally secret.

Got it, it hasn't happened yet so it will never happen.

I work in computers.

When it starts to happen, it will be a paper in a research journal. Then it will be years as people analyze the paper and come to undersstanding of what the new stuff can do.

Things don't just "pop up" magically without warning. There's papers, journals, discussions. If we aren't even at the "discussion" point yet, its kind of worthless to spend more thought on it.


All this "ChatGPT" thing is an advanced neural network. Those things were first discovered in 1960s, Tensors (ie: applications of neural nets to SIMD compute) was 90s / 00s thing, and NVidia GPU optimizations to the models were researched through the 2010s.

I can reliably count on research taking decades. Because computers, algorithms, and AI is very difficult. Anyone paying attention in this field will see it coming.

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The stock market is based upon human behavior and however flawed and irrational it is. Even HFT works to exploit human behavior so I bundle it into the same category.

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Oh that much is very true and this and reddit pretty much show it. Though I can't say I'm not trying to at least profit off of reddit's insanity. Play the absolutely shitty game.

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I'm still left wondering how it isn't election interference if a foreigner invests in DJT.

Anything is worth exactly what you can sell it for. Currently, who the hell would pay a nickel for that POS platform? Of course, I'm sure that Elon has a doppelgänger somewhere.

I've never used it, don't know anybody who uses it, and can't even tell you the URL.

Then again I currently only use Lemmy.