There are plenty of legit ways to directly give Trump money – why do it in the most indirect and volatile way possible?
How would Trump make money from this scheme? He would sell some stock? As his stock dwindles, each bribe becomes less efficient.
Pump and dump schemes happen all the time. Nothing new about how to make money doing it.
Yeah bribing somebody through a public financial market is highly inefficient. Also, public financial markets are more regulated (and observable) than private ones. Overpaying for property, hospitality services, or Jared’s expertise is a much better conduit.
Hrm. Successful startups generally don’t write boilerplate like: “TMTG does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.” I mean sure, maybe Devin Nunes will discover oil or an unobtainium mine under Truth Social HQ. But there’s no reasonable expectation of that happening. It’s not like the managers have any track record of spotting new opportunities, except for grift. This is a replay of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, founded in 1995, loaded up with lousy assets some purchased from Trump himself, bankrupt in 2004, defunct in 2016.
More detail on the freefall below. It started when investors got their first look at the actual financials – Truth Social is losing money hand over fist on poor gross revenues.
So the answer to “how can Truth Social be worth $6 billion” appears to be “it can’t, and it isn’t”. Can anyone other than a true MAGAt honestly say that they’re surprised? Or more generally, that everything that Trump touches turns to shit. It’s now only a question of time before it’s completely worthless.
I am no fan of Trump (far from it) but aren’t there many examples of overvalued tech companies out there? I don’t think this is unusual except for the asshole at the center of it.
My guess is Trump will muddle through with Truth Social till the election. If he gets elected then the stock price will likely soar. If he doesn’t then I doubt he cares. He is probably going to prison.
There sure have been many tech bubbles, and many of them have burst. Even so, they were broadly focused tech companies with actual potential, like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. TS is nothing more than a platform for Trump’s unhinged illiterate attacks and bloviations, either in all-caps or randomly capitalized. There is no market for this crap beyond diehard MAGAts, and no value even to them after Trump either dies, goes to prison, or otherwise fades away. Even less so now that Musk has turned Xitter into a haven for right-wing lunatics.
Yeah, there are lots of examples of the pump and dump variety. A long and sordid history. Attracting dumb money, repelling institutional investors (who can be dumb, though in a different way).
Over the past 30 years, is there a single example of a stupider tech stock? Could be! Here’s a list of dot-com bubble companies. I challenge the board to find an example with comparable valuation and worse fundamentals given information well known and obvious at the time. So Enron doesn’t count, because it was based on accounting lies.
Now there is one 1990s company with $10 million in revenue and $123 million in operating costs, that was valued at $12 billion in 2022 dollars, ha, ha, no there isn’t.
Not for a personal blog with a market cap over $6B.
Amazon was like that. Back when it was thought of as an online bookstore questions were being asked about the profitability. The company was way in the red. Of course the difference is that Bezos was building the infrastructure of the company. TS has no infrastructure.
The infrastructure is access to control of the US government to the highest bidder and payouts to the people who back Trump now. It’s a modern-day version of the Nazi party, buy in early, and maybe you get to run the Ministry of Death Camps. Fall out of favor and you get purged.
I remember at the time telling people to avoid etoys.com, because it had a valuation higher than ToysRUs, despite ToysRUs having thousands of retail stores, a killer brand, AND a website that was already better than eToys. The only thing eToys had was a company name that ended in .com. The same was true for Pets.com, which never made sense in a world containing Amazon.
Some of those companies on the list are still alive, and some were good ideas that just got killed in the aftermath of the bubble popping. All of them were overvalued at the time.
The Night of the Long Trump Steak Knives?
I wonder how much Trump must be insured for as key personnel. If he were to choke on a quarter pounder tomorrow, the value of TS would completely crater. There would be nothing left of value.
I think it is funny that some think that money would be reinvested in this sham company!
insert Trump milking dying cow gif here
To me, it didn’t make sense that Pets.com was selling a fifty-pound bag of dog food for the same amount as a local pet store, but also shipping it to your house. Obviously, web retailers like that or Chewy want you to also buy higher-margin goods like leashes or dog toys.
If you believe in market efficiency, there must be some expectation of significant cash flow coming in at some point in the future. If this scheme works, there could literally be $Billions in “revenue” coming into DJT each year, beginning as early as 2025. The type of revenue? How about “consulting” revenue from Saudi Arabia and Russia? How much would Putin pay Trump to lift the banking sanctions? Just that alone would be worth $100’s of Billions to Putin. And what US regulatory authority is going to go after DJT? Ultimately, it’s a bet on Trump winning the presidency.
Trump is about Trump: he’s not about building businesses. If Saudi Arabia wants to hire a consultant, there’s no reason to hire a company that Trump owns 60% of at most. They will hire a consultant from a 100% owned Trump company. DJT stockholders are DJT bag holders.
Institutions aren’t buying this stock. It’s MAGA retail investors who will get burnt, just as the graduates of Trump University did or the purchasers of Trump Casino and Resorts (same ticker: DJT). This is a pump and dump scheme, something that’s been observed many times before, whatever your theory of financial markets is.
Sam_Stone: I gamed my question a little. I don’t think you can point to a single dot-com stock that was more moronic than the new DJT in dollar terms. But I have to admit that the sum of 1990s dot-com absurdities - backed by institutions - far exceeds the sum of all bubbles today. That has to count for something.
And among categories of fraud, I assume without checking that Madoff was worse and Ponzi was worse (inflation adjusted). I’m guessing that Trump will get away with this one (because the illegalities aren’t large), though he will cash out at far below one billion dollars. But who knows? It’s a pump/dump.
Picture of American salesman George Parker, purveyor of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Time for Infrastructure Week!
Don’t let the name fool you; the knives aren’t that long.
The trick is they have to leverage the ability to service (for example) the entire NY/NJ Metro area from a single warehouse in an industrial area, rather than service the same customer set from 50 individual, prominent, high cost, retail locations, like Petco does.