And another one.
A merger by Trump's social media company could net him billions of dollars, a potential lifeline as he faces more than $500 million in civil judgments.
www.google.com
A former executive of the blank-check acquisition vehicle that plans to take Donald Trump's social media company public sued to block the deal until he obtained a larger payout, according to a lawsuit docketed on Thursday in Delaware.
www.reuters.com
So, TMTG, a company that appears to have Truth Social as its only significant product, is being valued (on paper) at $10 billion, giving Trump a theoretical $4 billion windfall.
That's an interesting valuation. To put it in context, alternative valuations of Truth Social are about $15-25 million, and TMTG has lost over $30 million since 2022. As a comparison, Truth Social has a little over half a million daily users. X (fka Twitter) has over 100 million daily users, and is currently estimated to be worth about twice the claims of TMTG, $20 billion.
This $10 billion valuation is insane. At best, it might be a marketing scam - it seems deeply implausible that serious investors are going to go anywhere near a valuation of $10 billion. The best that can be expected is that a load of Trump fanatics and supporters load up with shares (at the obscenely overvalued asking price) to demonstrate their loyalty, and will then be rewarded with the value of those shares instantly tanking by an order of magnitude or worse. Even then there is no credible chance that they will get close to $10 billion.
The alternative is that this TMTG is simply marketed as an investment vehicle: they've hired a crack team of investment experts who are going to take that $10 billion from the IPO as a fund to invest in other (media / tech) companies. In the sense that your investment money will therefore go into a portfolio of proper, actual companies, you might hold your share value. However, even then if people can plough $10 billion into a $10 billion company and Donald Trump gets to own $4 billion of it, I would suggest those investors are getting royally stiffed.