Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk turned increasingly toward the right in his posts and actions on the platform, also using X to try to sway political discourse around the world. He’s gotten in a dustup with a Brazilian judge over censorship, railed against what he calls the “woke mind virus” and amplified false claims that Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to vote in U.S. elections. The slide continued on Tuesday, with Trump Media shares slipping $3.29, or 12.4%, to $23.32 in early afternoon trading. “Their policy also leaves a lot of room for the company to decide which other type of content they deem inappropriate. And they have made use of that, with reports that they banned accounts that tweeted about the Jan. 6th investigation and parody accounts who were accused of impersonating others,” Muenster said. Truth Social’s feed looks much like X’s, with a purple color scheme and a “for you” section of recommended posts as well as a feed of accounts a user follows.
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As NPR’s Domenico Montanaro reported in March when Trump first floated the idea of launching such a platform, the whole project is a tough one in which to find success. First, competing with the massive influence and reach of existing platforms is a big challenge — one other conservative platforms haven’t managed to get much traction on, either. Also, Trump has in the past had many pie-in-the-sky ventures that haven’t worked out — and he’s facing his own brand problems in the wake of his presidency and the violence on Jan. 6, so the scope of who would participate in the platform would likely be limited. TRUTH Social is expected to have a beta launch in November with a wider rollout in 2022, according to the release. Interested users can sign up for the platform on truthsocial.com — but there have been questions raised about the initial security of the site.
Trump Media launching Truth Social streaming service, where it says creators “won’t be cancelled”
However, the site fares better than rivals in the so-called “alt-tech” space, such as Parler, which just returned to Apple’s app store this week after being offline for more than a year, or Gettr, which had less than 2 million visitors in February. Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced plans to launch his own social networking platform called TRUTH Social, which is expected to begin its beta launch for “invited guests” next month. The price of shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp. closed down 13% Friday after the shell company’s shareholders approved the merger. The value of Trump’s shares in the merged company would be affected by any decline in DWAC’s share price. Trump Media’s stock plunged 18.4% on Monday after the company filed a regulatory document that opens the door for the potential sale of millions more shares.
Truth Social
Backers of Digital World – the vast majority of whom are individual investors instead of Wall Street firms, many apparently Trump loyalists – seemed unfazed. Stock prices for DWAC skyrocketed Thursday after the announcement, according to CNBC. To be sure, conservative-leaning TV networks already exist, including One America News Network (OANN) and Christian Broadcast Network, which produces the 700 Club. And conservative commentator Tucker Carlson debuted his Tucker Carlson Network after parting ways with Fox News last year. “The real question is how does it trade a week from now, two weeks from now and nobody really knows.” Trump Media’s Truth Social, a Twitter-like service, brought in just $3.3m in revenue in the first nine months of last year and lost nearly $50m.
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In a statement Wednesday night, Miller said, “Trump has always been a great deal-maker, but we just couldn’t come to terms on a deal.” Miller congratulated Trump on the launch of his company. In response to what he and allies viewed as Big Tech censorship, Trump first teased starting his own social media company back in March. Trump and others have claimed that the major tech platforms try to silence conservative voices — though some, notably the commentator Ben Shapiro, have found huge popularity because of their presence on social media. Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S.
- “There is plenty of opportunity for the DJT stock price to recover, but it likely goes down first,” Emons added.
- “As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the Internet from Big Tech censors,” said Trump Media chief executive Devin Nunes, a former congressman.
- From its founding, the company aimed to create what it called a “media powerhouse” with multiple platforms, including social media and digital streaming.
- The Republican presidential candidate wrongly said AI was used on a photo showing thousands at a Harris rally in Detroit, BBC Verify reports.
- Several lawsuits recently filed over the merger’s terms did not affect the voting schedule but could ultimately impact the allocation of shares to people who played key roles in setting the merger in motion in late 2021.
It was a glitchy start, but it shot to the top of Apple’s list of most downloaded free apps. Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, is poised to become a publicly listed company, after a majority of shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp voted on Friday to acquire it. Meanwhile, one of Trump Media’s main assets — its publicly traded stock — is continuing to lose value. That’s noteworthy because one route for a publicly traded company to raise additional capital is through secondary stock sales.
Even before his endorsement, the tech CEO had already been working privately to support a pro-Trump super PAC. The group, known as America PAC, is now under investigation by election officials for alleged misleading attempts to collect data from voters. Monday’s meeting highlighted the evolving personal relationship between Trump and Musk, two of the world’s most powerful men, who have shifted from being bitter rivals to unlikely allies over the span of one election season.
Shares surged past $70 in early trade, giving the firm a market value of more than $9bn. “If the merger is complete Friday at 10am and Trump all of a sudden has… shares of DJT that’s worth three, four, five $10bn, who knows? He could easily leverage that to get a loan,” he said. But in this case, analysts said a bank would probably lend him significantly less than the shares are worth on paper, given the potential risks of the business. The deal is unlikely to immediately resolve Mr Trump’s most pressing financial issues, such as his New York fraud penalty. Digital World, or DWAC (pronounced D-whack), is what is known as a SPAC, or a shell business created expressly to buy another firm and take it public. “This is just the start,” Chad Nedohin, a deal supporter, said on his show DWAC Live on the video platform Rumble after the approval was announced.
Still, Musk formally endorsed Trump two days after his assassination attempt last month. Trump Media said its streaming TV platform will first unveil on the Truth Social app before eventually making its way to home TV streaming. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey — the most recent one available — found that while 27 percent of Americans had heard of Truth Social, only 2 percent used it to get their news. It was second only to Parler, which was temporarily taken offline following the Jan. 6 attack.
Trump’s audience on X is legions larger than on Truth Social, which became a publicly traded company earlier this year. Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly dormant X account is followed by 88 million. Musk’s account, which hosted the interview, has more than 193 million followers. Muenster notes that while it is marketed as a free expression platform, Truth Social still engages in some content moderation, including limiting illegal or copyrighted material. It’s also stricter on sexual content and language than other platforms, she said.
Now that it’s being traded on the market, some $300 million is expected to flow into the company and TMTG will be required to report its quarterly finances as well as other material news to the Securities and Exchange Commission. While at the outset, Trump will hold the majority of its stock, should he decide to sell it, the company’s stock will be subject to the whims of Wall Street, with investors looking for healthy finances and growth. He and other Trump Media executives are largely restricted from selling their shares for roughly another five months. Such lockup periods, as they’re known, are common with newly listed companies because they keep insiders from dumping shares shortly after a company goes public, which can destabilize a stock and cause it to sink in value. The vote by DWAC shareholders comes about 2½ years after the so-called special purpose acquisition company announced plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, the private firm that owns the Truth Social app platform.
The session was intended to serve as a way for the former president to reach potentially millions of voters directly. It was also an opportunity for X, a platform that relies heavily on politics, to redeem itself after some struggles. Musk, a former Trump critic, said the Republican nominee’s toughness, as demonstrated by his reaction to last month’s shooting, was critical for national security. “There is plenty of opportunity for the DJT stock price to recover, but it likely goes down first,” Emons added. Trump reaches far fewer people on his platform, where he has less than 7 million followers, than he might on X, where he boasts 87 million. The long-awaited moment will inject more than $200m into Trump Media & Technology Group and hands the former president a stake worth more than $4bn.
The rare public conversation between Trump and Musk, which spanned more than two hours Monday night and was overwhelmingly friendly, revealed little new about Trump’s plans for a second term. The former president spent much of the discussion focused on his recent assassination attempt, illegal immigration and his plans to cut government regulations. Trump Media’s stock are at risk of falling further, Ben Emons, senior portfolio manager at NewEdge Wealth, said in an April 15 research note. The price of the warrants, which give their holders the right to buy the stock at a certain price, has plunged 43% from their March 26 peak and now indicate the share price could decline to $17.50, he said. The company’s board, which is stocked with allies including one of his sons, could potentially change that rule, but analysts have said they think that would be unlikely to happen immediately.
Trump’s lawyers in a court filing said he did not have enough cash to offer as collateral to bond companies for a bond that would secure the judgment and prevent James from collecting. Trump earlier this week asked a New York appeals court to issue a stay of the $454 million fraud judgment as he seeks to overturn the verdict in the case. Trump’s long-gone casino and hotel company also traded under that ticker symbol.
It claims about 8.9 million sign-ups and in regulatory filings Trump Media warns prospective investors that it does not track metrics like user growth or engagement that could give them a sense of its operations. Several lawsuits recently filed over the merger’s terms did not affect the voting schedule but could ultimately impact the allocation of shares to people who played key roles in setting the merger in motion in late 2021. Musk, who described himself as a “moderate Democrat” until recently, suggested in 2022 that Trump was too old to be president again.