Trump’s New Social Media Company Is His Biggest Scam

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Like the skepticism you’ve heard so far, Donald Trump announced Wednesday night that he would launch his own social media network, the embarrassingly named TRUTH Social. For those of you who are scratching your head and wondering, But wait, didn’t Trump launch a new social media company? you’re probably thinking of (1) one of the wing networks associated with the former president, like Gab, Parler, or Gettr, or (2) something called “From Donald J. Trump’s Desk, “the blog that published Trump’s comments and closed after only a month because it barely had readers.

Clearly, the lack of readers is annoying to the former president, who has spent most of the last decade tweeting every crazy thought that enters him, from “I want to convey my long-awaited to everyone, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th ”to“ NO, NO MATTER WHY THE COUNTRY OF THE UNITED STATE OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSCIENCE OF THOSE WHO WANT WHERE THROUGH HISTORY HAVE BEEN SICK BECAUSE ”to“ An ‘extremely credible source’ called my office and told me that The @BarackObama birth certificate was a fraud. ”Unfortunately for Trump, his ban from Twitter, was due to the instigation of a rebellion, remains in effect.Therefore, TRUTH Social.

Like most Trump initiatives, TRUTH Social is incredibly catchy and embarrassing. For one thing, even before it was launched, per The Washington Post, patriotic antics saw a seemingly unreleased version and posted “a picture of a dirty pig on the ‘donaldjtrump’ account,” which cause to pull it offline. For others, network service rules dictate that users should avoid “excessive capitalization,” i.e., the only way Donald Trump knows how to type. Then there is also the fact that TRUTH Social, billed as a vehicle for “stand[ing] up to the tyranny of Big Tech, ”claimed by conservatives who hate free speech, which prohibits users from saying anything to“ harm, defile, or damage, in our opinion, us and / or the Site. “Meanwhile, the whole thing is basically a crappier version of Twitter. Per the Post:

The site almost looks like a Twitter clone: ​​A user can post Truths, which are like tweets, or Re-Truths, which are retweets. There’s also a news feed, called Truth Feed, a notification system so users know “who’s interacting with your TRUTH,” noted in the social network’s App Store profile.

So yeah, the whole thing looks like a big flop no doubt with very few users, and Trump himself could get bored with the app and just post there little by little. But in this case, it doesn’t really matter, and Trump may have actually figured out a way to earn millions despite the product being a joke. How? We’re glad you asked!

TRUTH Social was formed through a merger of a new company set up by Trump, the Trump Media & Technology Group, and a special acquisition company, aka a SPAC. The SPACs, which are all the rage now are the Trump Media & Technology Group. In this case, SPAC TMTG’s merger is called Digital World Acqu acquisition Corp., which is managed by a man named Patrick Orlando, a former investment banker who previously founded a sugar-trading company. As Danxiack tweeted of Axios this morning, “The thing on Trump social media SPAC filed SEC papers this morning, but it’s just a re -press release. There’s no substance, including management, etc. So far, it’s is a shell that buys a shell. ”Normally, this would be embarrassing for a company, but in this case, because of the SPAC of it all, along with Trump’s uniquely disgruntled supporters, it doesn’t matter.

As Bloomberg Matt Levine wrote:

I’m not going to pretend to make a business case [a Trump social media network]—There is a long history of ridiculous failures in the “social media for Trump” category —but maybe you can. This is not a definite thing, in any case. Maybe it will work, maybe not. When Twitter Inc. went public, it wasn’t even profitable, and you know, a real social network that people used. Maybe Twitter But Trump is immediately profitable, but boy, I have some doubts. On the other hand, if Donald Trump launches a company like, “I’m going to start a social media platform for Trump fans,” can he get people to buy the stock? I think the two main lessons of the last few years have been:

You can get people to buy any stock; and Donald Trump can get people to buy anything.

So if Donald Trump announced, “Hey, I’m going to do a social media company, buy some stock,” people will buy some stock. And then he gets a lot of money. And then if the social media platform didn’t end up making money – like I couldn’t imagine it would be! —Then he’ll have, uh, still have that money? And if the social media platform doesn’t end up being launched – if Trump and his crack team of technologists can’t actually build a well -functioning online social network — will he still have the money? And if there wasn’t really a crack team of technologists, if no one even tried to build the social media platform – you can see where I’m going here, right?

The point is that if you’re going to launch a company with the goal of making it profitable, you need to, like, come up with a workable business plan and implement it and deal with a million different complex operations. If you are launching a company with the goal of selling a lot of stock, you need people to trust you and give you their money. There is some overlap between things! But they are different things!

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