TRUTH SOCIAL #PRAVDASOCIAL & Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) NASDAQ:DJT - SPAC Digital World Acquisition Corp

[Luke]

Luke Johnson @Orly_licious 11h
Congratulations MAGA for making 21-year-old data analysts from the United Arab Emirates lots of money on $DJT! "Pump-and-dump investors cash out on 'crazy' Trump fans buying up Truth Social stock". Who coulda predicted. #TruthSocial #PravdaSocial https://rawstory.com/truth-social-stock ... 667655501/

[bill_g]

Not sure if this is behind a paywall. Interesting history and analysis in the first 4 stages. Plus an update.

Trump Media Is Not a Meme Stock. It’s a Cryptocurrency
Investors aren’t buying DJT for future cash flows.
John Rekenthaler
Mar 28, 2024

https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/trum ... meme-stock

Stage Number Five: Cryptocurrency

That makes sense. Every single hard core MAGAT that I've met is also a crypto evangelist. And there seems to be reciprocity - that the majority of crypto pushers are also MAGATs. They have this warped end-timer fantasy that the economy is going to crash and only crypto will be worth anything in the aftermath.

[RTH10260]

Exclusive: Trump Media saved in 2022 by Russian-American under criminal investigation
Trump’s social media company went public relying partly on loans from trust managed by person of interest to prosecutors

Hugo Lowell
Wed 3 Apr 2024 12.00 CEST

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

The existence of the trust was first reported by the Guardian last year. However, who controlled the account, how the trust was connected to Paxum Bank, and how the money had been funneled through the trust to Trump Media was unknown.

The new details about the trust are drawn from documents including: Paxum Bank records showing Postolnikov having access to the trust’s account, the papers that created the trust showing as its settlor a lawyer in St Petersburg, Russia, and three years of the trust’s financial transactions.

The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not.

Paxum Bank does not offer loans in the US as it lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC. Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan.

Postolnikov, the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has not been charged with a crime. In response to an email to Postolnikov seeking comment, a lawyer in Dominica representing Paxum Bank warned of legal action for reporting the contents of the leaked documents.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... 2022-loans

[bob]

L.A. Times: I spent 24 hours on Trump’s Truth Social so you don’t have to. No wonder it’s tanking:

Twenty-four hours of scrolling through posts from “Truthsayers” on the two-year-old platform explained why the site is tanking. In short, partisan echo chambers are stale, musty spaces that lack the sort of oppositional views needed to make social media tick. Truth Social feels like a MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room, where an endless line of folks step up to the mic to share how the world is out to get them.

The Truth Social feed I experienced was a mix of swaggering gun talk, typo-filled Bible scripture, violent Biden bashing, nonsensical conspiracy theories and more misguided memes about Jan. 6 “hostages,” trans satanists and murderous migrants than anyone should be subjected to in one day. Or ever.

What I didn’t see were the anodyne news posts that populate other social platforms, pushback against absurd misinformation about “tsunamis of death for the highly vaccinated!” or ads for much that wasn’t Trump-branded, Trump-adjacent or sold by My Pillow.

* * *

There was little conversation about the platform’s stock plummet, but there was plenty of chatter about a supposed trans takeover, alleged Dem voter fraud, President Biden purportedly sniffing a baby repeatedly during Sunday’s White House Easter egg hunt and a pointless poll from the Daily Mail showing that Trump would beat Michelle Obama if a hypothetical presidential election were held today.

* * *

This site has a star, and he garners far more adulation than heat. Thousands of users liked and “ReTruthed” his boasts about a presidential endorsement from Hungarian leader and strongman Viktor Orban, his complaints about the latest gag order from a judge presiding over one of his many court cases and his link to a Newsweek story about Trump sneakers reselling on EBay for $450,000.

* * *

Advertisers also like lots of users, and the platform’s ads — or lack thereof — are indicative of the challenges Truth Social has faced in finding companies willing to spend on Trump’s platform. A majority of ads, labeled “Sponsored Truth,” are for Trump-branded merchandise: a 2024 Save America “gold” card, a “California for Trump” hat, an American flag embossed with more MAGA jargon.

Many of the retailers who buy space on the platform appeal to MAGA voters with Fox News-like candor. “Liberals Will Hate to See This!” boasts one ad for a “Love Like Jesus” hoodie. But as Monday’s financial disclosure showed, that niche market might not be enough to put the company in the black.

[Suranis]

Hell, Twitter struggled to make any money too, as far as I remember.

[Mr brolin]

Main sources of revenue are typically

Ad revenue and paid for product placement
Monetizing users data by sale or rent
Access to valid email accounts for everything from scammy sales pitches a-la Alex Jones to political fund raising..sorry repeated myself.
Data and system licensing
News, advertising and "influencer" collaboration or portal provision

"Turd Asocial" has little in the way of any of the above to sell.

A small and apparently shrinking active user base
A pretty heterogeneous and older user base
A user base where free spend dollars are probably a bit thin on the ground
A socio-economic and political mindset that is pretty monomaniacal so little room for large audience news 'n view's. If Fox is seen as a bit libtard....
Nothing to sell other than Trump

Not seeing a long term survival here.... then again Freak Rethuglic is still rumbling along....... The Freepathon scam that keeps on grifting

[Kendra]

#ETTD

[bob]

Hell, Twitter struggled to make any money too, as far as I remember.

Except for two years pre-Musk, Twitter has consistently lost money.

Musk said he has cut expenses, but revenues also have fallen. And because Musk took Twitter private, he doesn't have to publicly disclose its finances.

[RTH10260]

DESPERATE Trump Attempts TO SEIZE Co-Founder’s Stock

MeidasTouch
3 Apr 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump’s greedy attempt to take back shares promised to the co-founders of Trump Media and Truth Social.

► Show Spoiler

[MN-Skeptic]

A gift link to a NYTimes article about short selling DJT stock -

Traders Are Betting Millions That Trump Media Will Tumble

The parent company of Truth Social is a popular target for short-sellers, even after they lost $100 million last month betting on a decline in the stock that didn’t come.

Before former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company made its stock market debut, many investors were lining up to bet on its collapse. After the company’s share price plunged following an initial surge, the appetite to bet against the stock has grown even more ravenous.

Trump Media & Technology Group, which trades under the ticker DJT, slipped on Wednesday to below $50 per share, extending a steep decline this week that pulled the stock down from its high near $80 and erased more than $2 billion of market value.

Trump Media is the most “shorted” special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit.

The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet.

“They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly,” said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3.

[northland10]

Generally, I dislike short-selling but in this case, I'm good with it. Turn it into a penny stock.

[Dr. Ken]

and after the rise from yesterday the stock is now down 4.13% and lower than what it was early in the week at around $46.83

[johnpcapitalist]

WUT.....?

In the SEC filing......

In a filing on Monday, TMTG’s management said that “adhering to traditional key performance indicators, such as signups, average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, or active user accounts including monthly and daily active users, could potentially divert its focus” away from growth

Not like any of my former colleagues and competitors would have signed up to write stock research on this turd, but a company in social media that doesn't put out audience metrics is never going to get professional investors to consider buying the stock. Of course, all Fogbowsers have figured this out already and don't need me to point that out, but I thought I'd say it for the record.

It's almost like the management is telling institutional investors to stay away. But in doing so, they're missing an opportunity to restrict the "float," the number of shares that trade on the open market. I haven't looked at the filings, but before the six-month lockup prohibiting Trump from dumping his shares expires, typically, only a small percentage of company shares is available to buy or sell on an exchange. In an IPO, that's typically around 20% of the total number of shares. I don't know what the float is for a SPAC (a.k.a., a reverse shell) deal like this, but it's probably similar.

If you have a recent offering that's dropping like a dead cat and you can't prop it up because of the relatively small float, then you'd want to have some institutional investor presence in the deal, because regular mutual funds would tend to buy and hold to be tax-efficient. That would reduce float still further. Let's assume that the float on this deal is 20%. If it were a quality deal, you could expect institutions to hang on to a chunk of that, say 10% of the total shares out (or half the float). That would increase competition from individual investors susceptible to all the hoopla around the deal, and would push the price higher or at least damp out the move to the downside. But saying you're not going to publish common metrics absolutely guarantees no institutional participation...

Too, also, hedge funds that might otherwise play the stock on the short side will see the lack of metrics as an opportunity to wade in and short the stock, or to buy "put" options on it (i.e., betting that the stock will go down). There are restrictions on shorting a stock in the first 30 days after an IPO, but they don't seem to apply to a SPAC after it does its merger. So the hedge funds with an appetite for fun in a small part of their holdings can short this. There have already been several articles about how they're doing this.

A lot of people have a negative impression of short sellers, thinking that they are somehow doing something naughty. It turns out that having a "symmetric" market, where buying long or short positions in a particular security, is actually very helpful. Most importantly, investors on the short side will step in to buy at some point to close out their positions, theoretically when a stock has dropped so far that it is selling at or below its tangible asset value. And that provides support to stop stocks from going to $zero in a never-ending death spiral. But I'm sure all the hedgies that are short DJT know full well that there is absolutely no asset value to the company, so they're probably going to short it to zero, because a) that's what the stock is actually worth, and b) so they can brag that they actually "shorted it to zero," a slang expression that rarely, if ever, actually happens.

[Luke]

BRAVO! I love you JPC. It's so well-written and easy to understand.

And, importantly, it looks like saving our money for the FrankSpeech IPO is looking like a better decision every day. Now that would be a security they'd JUMP to initiate coverage on!

Which would have more enterprise value*, Nasdaq:DJT or OTC:MJL (Michael J. Lindell)? Tough, right?



* FYI for folks who may not know:
A stock's enterprise value (EV) is a measure of a company's total value, including both its market capitalization (the total market value of its outstanding shares) and its debt, minus cash and cash equivalents. It's calculated as follows:

Enterprise Value (EV) = Market Capitalization + Total Debt - Cash and Cash Equivalents

Enterprise value provides a more comprehensive picture of a company's value compared to market capitalization alone because it takes into account its debt and cash positions. It's often used in financial analysis to assess a company's overall valuation and to compare it to other companies within the same industry.

[jcolvin2]

Commentators often reference the lock-up period (six months) as something might limit Trump's ability to sell his shares in TMTG, though some state that this can be waived. I am curious if JP Capitalist or anyone else knows whether the Rule 144 volume limitations might apply because Trump is an "affiliate" of the company. I understand that anyone who owns (or will own) a relatively healthy percentage of the stock (10% or more) may be limited in how much they can sell each quarter.

[Foggy]

I think he's also not allowed to use the stock as collateral for a loan, iirc.

[johnpcapitalist]

Commentators often reference the lock-up period (six months) as something might limit Trump's ability to sell his shares in TMTG, though some state that this can be waived. I am curious if JP Capitalist or anyone else knows whether the Rule 144 volume limitations might apply because Trump is an "affiliate" of the company. I understand that anyone who owns (or will own) a relatively healthy percentage of the stock (10% or more) may be limited in how much they can sell each quarter.

A six-month lockup is not a statutory requirement, but is a common practice that is part of the merger contract or IPO offering documents, and is thus contractually binding. In that case, it can't be waived, as a prudent investor would certainly want to know whether insiders can dump their shares and walk away. In other words, it's material information, and if the offering or merger filings misstate that, it'd be fraud.

I don't recall Rule 144 requirements but they would be in addition to any agreed-upon lockup period, not superseding it and thus giving Trump a back door to dump this turd.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

So, why did management choose not to provide audience metrics? Lack of experience? Cuz Drumpf said so?

[tek]

So, why did management choose not to provide audience metrics? Lack of experience? Cuz Drumpf said so?

Because they stink?

[pipistrelle]

So, why did management choose not to provide audience metrics? Lack of experience? Cuz Drumpf said so?

Embarrassing.

[p0rtia]

Too also, it's easier to lie about the numbers if you don't tell anyone what they are.

[Ben-Prime]

Too also, it's easier to lie about the numbers if you don't tell anyone what they are.

As far as I'm concerned, it will always have 11,779 members. Which was one less than he needed. >.> <.<

[Volkonski]

DJT down to 42.55 just now

[Volkonski]

DJT down to 42.55 just now

41.70

[Volkonski]

41.57