Investing in Trump Media, and other ways to lose your shirt
Contributing columnist
The Washington Post
March 25, 2024 at 9:13 a.m. EDT
I don’t give investment advice. But I assure you that a company with $3.4 million in revenue and $49 million in losses over the past nine months is not worth $5 billion. Buy into shares of any company with those numbers and you are certain to be taken for a sucker.
That Donald Trump will be the one doing the bamboozling means that investors in his soon-to-be-public media company might as well be making a political donation to his campaign or contributing to a Trump legal defense fund instead. This scheme is unfolding in the plain light of day, and securities regulators are powerless to do anything about it.
The company in question is Digital World Acquisition, a SPAC, or special-purpose acquisition company, formed three years ago. It raised nearly $300 million in a 2021 initial public offering with the intention of buying another company. The company Digital World decided to buy is a now-two-year-old, 36-employee start-up called Trump Media & Technology Group, whose “first” product, according to securities filings, is Truth Social, Trump’s answer to Twitter.
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