The Merger of Trump Media and Digital World Acquire Corp. to Trump Media After a Year of Dilemma for a Public Company
It may not come soon enough to help former President Trump, who is facing mounting legal issues.
The shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. is being merged with Trump Media. It allows a company to go public without having to go through all the hoops of a traditional initial public offering.
The process of listing Trump Media has been quite convoluted, like the career and business of the former president, marked by investigations, lawsuits and general chaos.
Trump Media and Technology Group’s shareholders voted on Friday to merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. The vote is a culmination of a years-long saga attempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what’s known as a SPAC deal. DJT will trade under the ticker when it goes public.
But Digital World has struggled to find enough shareholders to show up in previous key votes, so there are no guarantees that they can get enough of a quorum on Friday to approve the merger.
And the process to this point has been far from easy in other ways. Digital World has also faced scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it has also faced lawsuits from key shareholders that are still pending
The Truth Social and the Price of Wall Street: Why Do We Wanna Be? Why Does The Trump Media Suppose It’s Coming to an End?
Analysts agree those kinds of valuations are far removed from the actual value of Trump Media. The Truth Social had revenue of more than $3 million in the first nine months of last year.
And that’s why the stock is widely seen as a “meme stock,” meaning shares that are driven by the whims of individual investors and not for any fundamental factors.
In recent years, stock markets have seen clear examples of this, like retailer Gamestop and movie chain AMC, which have both experienced spectacular rallies during the Pandemic.
Jay Ritter, Cordell professor of finance at the University of Florida says Digital World is not much different from the craze that enveloped those two stocks.
There are professional investors, too, looking for opportunities to profit from the deal. Matthew Tuttle is the CEO of Tuttle Capital Management.
“While fundamentally. I don’t get it, I’m going to trade it because it’s going to move,” Tuttle says. “It’s going to have a rabid following and it’s going to be a fun stock.”
Trump’s Truth Social Is Going Public: An Explanation of a Crowd Meeting in Washington, D.C., July 16, 2016
He could work out a deal that would allow him to sell some of his holdings before the share price starts to fall, though a large sale at once could send Trump Media shares sharply lower.
A man in a jack sparrow costume narrated the shareholder meeting in a livestream for more than 2,000 people. The chat exploded after the vote was passed. “THANK YOU JESUS!!!!!” There is a comment from a CanAmPatriot17 account.
Differentiating between Truth Social and Twitter is not hard to find. Instead of “tweeting,” users post a “truth.” A “retweet” is called a “retruth.” Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. After Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for his inciting of violence at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy.
The site is exactly what one might expect from a Trump-inspired social network. Groups dedicated to QAnon, election deniers, and other conspiracies are easy to find.
Source: Trump’s Truth Social Is Going Public
The case of Will Huntington-Cooper in the Trump media: A lawsuit against the SEC for misrepresentations under the Securities and Exchange Commission
In October 2022 Will was one of the senior employees at Trump media and filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that the company had made misrepresentations in violation of federal securities laws. Soon after filing the complaint, he was fired. The SEC eventually approved the merger proposal in February.
