As Biden’s lapdogs continue to nip at Trump’s heels, Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) announced a merger with Trump Media and Technology Group (parent company to Truth Social) on Friday. This merger will allow Truth Social to go public with Trump as the majority shareholder. Trump could be in the position to collect a $3 billion dollar windfall based on share prices of DWAC, currently trading at around $40.
DWAC is an SPAC, essentially a company that creates its own initial public offering (IPO), and then begins to prospect for a merger opportunity with a private company, in this case Truth Social via the Trump Media and Technology Group. Usually, companies that use SPACs garner higher valuations, but at higher initial costs.
The $3 billion in projected Truth Social share holdings may not come in time to help Trump with his legal battle against Democrat cronies Judge Arthur Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James. In unprecedented fashion, Engoron extended his jurisprudential sphere into the realm of real estate valuation, judging Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to be worth a fraction of what highly sophisticated corporate banking interests had calculated. Combined with the political crusader Letitia James, the media simp Engoron has colluded to bilk $464 million dollars from former President Donald Trump, under the threadbare cloak of New York style justice.
The $464 million dollar judgment against Trump is a transparent effort by the Democrat machine to cripple the only opposition to the Biden 2024 presidential campaign, dependent on every perverse manifestation of thuggery, cheating, and subversion to propel their corpse-candidate into a second term. However, the $3 billion dollar windfall may not help Trump in the short term, unless the Truth Social board can be persuaded to waive a 6 month lockout on Trump’s shares.
Monday, a New York court of appeals reduced Engoron’s outrageous judgement to $175 million and has granted 10 days to secure the funds. Though not a complete victory, the reduction is a signal that further mitigation may be forthcoming. In any case, its the jurisprudential equivalent of a slap across the matronly Letitia James’s jowls. Jonathan Turley posted on X, “The NY Court of Appeals has finally intervened to offer a modicum of restraint in the Trump case. It has…given former President Donald Trump 10 more days to post a bond of $175 million. That is likely doable and avoids the cliff drop set up by Engoron and James.” Turley continued in the thread, “The true sunk costs of this controversy are likely born by Democrats who are seen as engaging in raw lawfare.”
This isn’t Trump’s first foray into the equities market. Trump Entertainment Resorts IPO’d in 1995 and began trading at $14 dollars a share in an initial 10 million share offering, according to Forbes. In 2009 the company was delisted from the Nasdaq and was purchased by billionaire Carl Icahn in 2014. Forbes currently estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.6 billion.
The unsuccessful history of Trump Entertainment Resorts has given plenty of fodder for his ever grousing critics. However, focusing on a business setback is losing the forrest for a single rotten tree. Trump has expertly guided the fortunes of his empire for decades, and is one of the most inspiring business biographies of this century. His successes are undeniable and form the basis for much of the admiration heaped on him by his constituency. They know, as the majority of Americans know, that Trump’s business acumen provided the basis for his wildly successful presidency. We all felt that Midas touch in our own wallets.
It’s true that Truth Social hasn’t turned a profit, but as Breitbart points out, that’s hardly unique among the social media titans. Trump’s answer to X (formerly Twitter) generated revenues just over $3.4 million in the initial nine months of 2023 with losses of $49 million. When Twitter went public in 2013 it hemorrhaged money as it’s founders floundered to discover a workable solution to the monetization problem. After Twitter’s IPO, its losses grew to staggering proportions with the company reporting net losses of $520 million in 2015. Despite this financial bloodbath, Twitter was valued by the gods of Wall-street at $11 billion.
Truth Social is still a relatively small fish in a massive pond, but it has one thing going for it that even the colossal X doesn’t — despite a few hiccups, it’s the only truly free speech platform in existence. Despite all the work Elon Musk has done, X still suffers from shadow-banning, throttling, and banning accounts for inexplicable reasons. Though Elon has propounded policies that allegedly throttle content and not accounts, my colleague former FBI Supervisory Special Agent and former CNN contributor James Gagliano has been summarily and permanently banned from X with no explanation. My own account, created during the bad old days of Jack’s reign, delivers paltry engagement numbers when identical posts on other social media platforms receive 100x the engagement.
There are still goose-stepping, woke, jack-boots malingering in the shadows at X.
Critics of Truth Social are pouring on the bad press, sniggering that the IPO represents just another meme stock, unworthy of any serious analysis or investment. However, there is something of great substance undergirding the Truth Social valuations. It’s a social media company that represents not just the free speech interests of tens of millions of Americans, but is the primary platform of an individual they feel is key to the immediate survival of the Republic. Whether their sentiments are right or wrong, that represents a powerful organizing and monetizing impetus that no other social media platform can claim.
As legacy media and social media enterprises continue to balkanize, the niche which Truth Social occupies will only continue to deepen and widen. Revenue streams like subscriptions will surely bolster Truth Social profits as they have on X, though by adding real value to subscribers and real access to an ever expanding public square — Twitter’s original promise, a promise that Truth Social is positioned to fulfill.