Udder people’s money. The grift goes on, much like Charles Ponzi was blameless. Pumping does imply dumping.
“TMTG, as Bloomberg Opinion’s Timothy L. O’Brien and Matt Levine explain, has no products, no revenue, no cash flow, no known intellectual property, no big names attached and no “clear business plan,” only a wispy promise to build a new social media network (Truth Social).”
Trump and DWAC say they’ve also raised commitments for a billion dollars of investments through a private investment in public equity, or PIPE, arrangement. This is a normal thing that just means large private investors have committed to buying stock in the eventual public TMTG at a specifically arranged price. The part that gives it a special Trump flavor is that no one at DWAC or TMTG has disclosed who the investors are. They could be, for example, entities drawn from Trump’s robust international network of organized crime figures and corrupt government officials. Indeed, it would be a bit surprising if they weren’t!
slate.com/...
DWAC stock was trading as high as $175 per share. It has since settled in at around $43, which still values TMTG at almost $1.6 billion. That's not bad for a company that has no product, no users, no publicly identified executives, and no revenue.
2. The most detailed information we have about Trump's media company is from an investor presentation filed with the SEC.
I want to draw your attention to Page 22 of the presentation which is an overview of the "Infrastructure" of the company.
Pretty important!
3. I guess Trump did not expect anyone to actually READ this particular page
Because if you do, it makes absolutely no sense.
This is a social media and streaming company.
This page defines a "user" as "A sales representative who visits customers"
Huh?
4. Well if you look up all of this language, you can see that the definition of a "user" is just cut-and-pasted from open-source descriptions of enterprise software.
The description of a "User" comes from this page — a open-source framework for enterprise software
5. The entire page describing the "infrastructure" of Trump's media company is cut-and-pasted from other sites
In other words, not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be
6. Yet, this is a company purportedly worth $2 BILLION.
An unknown investor or investors have kicked in $1 BILLION.
But there is little evidence it really exists.
More on the mirage of Trump Media & Technology Group:
7. I'll be tracking this company closely.
For updates and more accountability journalism, check out my newsletter, Popular Information. Unlike Trump's investor presentation, it's original work! And it's free to sign up -->
Popular Information
• • •
For the first and perhaps the only time in his pugnacious political career, the California congressman and noted Trump apologist Devin Nunes is inspiring some kind of unanimity across party lines.
When news broke on Monday that Nunes was retiring from Congress to become chief executive of the fledgling Trump Media & Technology Group, nobody on the left or the right doubted he’d landed where he belonged. After 19 years as a reliably rock-ribbed Republican legislator, Nunes told his supporters that he wasn’t giving up on fighting his political enemies, just “pursuing it by other means” – and for once those enemies took him at his word.
Even Kevin McCarthy, the top-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and a fellow Californian, failed to raise any hackles when he said in a statement that nobody was better prepared than Nunes to lead an alternative to America’s tech and media giants. Nunes, after all, has spent years filing lawsuits against Twitter, the Washington Post, and a clutch of other media companies that he, and Trump, consider to be part of a “propaganda machine” for the Democrats.
In many ways, Nunes is embracing the role his detractors have long accused him of playing, as Trump’s ultimate yes man. Early in the Trump presidency, leading Democrats fumed that he was walking away from his grave responsibilities as chair of the House intelligence committee to be Trump’s “stooge” and “fixer”. Now, though, he is walking away from Congress to serve Trump, without pretending that anything else is at stake.
Both sides also broadly agree that Nunes’s surprise career move is a sign of the times. A generation ago, no politician of either party would have given up on the prospect of chairing the House ways and means committee, a job that would have been Nunes’s for the taking if the Republicans were to win next year’s congressional midterms. The position is often described as the best in Washington, because of the sweeping power it grants over a wide range of policy issues.
Nunes, however, appears to have calculated that in today’s Republican party the real power lies not in committee but in proximity to the former president, who remains the GOP’s undisputed kingmaker and may harbor ambitions to be more than that as the 2024 presidential election draws closer.
www.theguardian.com/...