This scam was never about the shareholders… They were just marks in Fat Donny Moscow’s latest fundraising effort.
AGAIN…
The Trumpanistas will NEVER blame The Fanta Menace. They’ll just say those dirty democrats forced the big money investors to stay away.
We are dealing with a cult here. If the NFTs didn’t tip you off, the gold shoes and bibles should have.
Seriously. Old Nan is my spirit guide in these trying times.
The only profitable “business” for Donny is money laundering with selling national secrets on the side. That’s why he wants his “Presidency” back so he can grifting for donation, and doing illegal things to enrich himself with impunity while shitting on everything that can hold him accountable.
The SEC needs to grow some teeth to bite this blatantly pump and dump scam.
Media empire? This is just a joke of a website stealing code from other open source project without giving credit by the lowest bidder in hope to get rich quick. He missed the timing. You have to get out when other fools get in, otherwise the ship will sink. I don’t see him selling any significant portion of his holding without tanking the whole thing. See Elmo and Tesla.
I was toying with the idea of shorting the stock on Friday, but was worried that it might stay irrationally inflated up until, say, the election.
So, I feel a little fomo seeing this happen, but, I can’t say I’m unhappy.
Since the board consists of idiots like Don Jr. and Devin Nunes I fully expect they will grant a waiver on the 6 month lockout period to allow Trump to try and dump as much of his shares as he can before the price heads into penny stock territory. The pool of suckers is shrinking fast so his billion dollar payout is definitely in jeopardy.
Is it crashing because Trump and Co are cashing out? Because that doesn’t seem like a win.
I hope people like Dan Oingoboingo lose his too-tight-fitting shirts.
Trump himself can’t cash out yet and he still owns more than half the shares.
I get the sense that the price bubble is a combination of a handful of true believers and a whole bunch of ethically challenged investors who know it’s all financially unsustainable hype but are trying to game the system for short-term profit a-la GameStop. The latter investors were always going to bail as soon as it looked like the bubble was done growing, and the recent media scrutiny combines with the dire financial statements have probably put the kibosh on growth for now.
A closer parallel would be pump-and-dump scams, perhaps because that’s essentially what this is. Pump-and-dump scammers make their money off two kinds of people: the first are the suckers who buy the stock because they believe the hype; the second are the people who recognize the scam for what it is, but think they can get rich by “riding the wave”, i.e. buying the stock and dumping it themselves when it reaches its peak.
Obviously, the suckers get fleeced; it’s more or less a straight transfer of money from them to the scammer. What we’ve learned is that the people who think they’re onto the scam lose out too. The reason is that the scammer controls the timing; they know when the dump is coming, and the self-styled “savvy investors” don’t.
The people who engineered Truth Social for Trump are going to be the first to cash out, and they’ll have set things up to give themselves a free hand. Trump is more constrained (because they didn’t want him dumping too early and screwing things up for them), but his tame board will release him from the six-month lock-up clause sooner or later. Then he will dump his shares too. He won’t give any advance notice (in fact, he’ll continue to deny that he’s doing so, even as he does). He may, if properly advised, even find ways to mask what he’s doing through dark pools or whatever, to try to postpone the inevitable price crash until he’s got all his money out.
Trump and his pals know when the dump is coming. Everyone else will only find out that it’s going on when the share price starts heading south. And all the people who bought Truth Social because they thought they could fleece the suckers run a very substantial risk of taking a haircut themselves, exactly as in a conventional pump-and-dump scam.
I’ve heard that truth.social has switched to Pleroma, which is generally lighter on resources than Masto. So there’s probably an even bigger difference in the bills for hosting.
I have not actually confirmed this by making a t.s account and I am kinda tempted to do this and then figure out a way to start posting abysmally huge files so as to waste their storage.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/01/media/truth-social-trump-media-stock-losses/index.html
The problem for Trump Media is its main product — Truth Social…
Garbage in garbage out.
And Mastodon.social has, what, at least three or four times the number of active users as Truth? It gives one a sense of Truth’s hosting costs at least,* even if the value of the labor outnumbers that many times over (and in Mastodon’s case is volunteer).
*Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Truth’s hosting costs were much higher than they needed to be, because someone was running a minor grift there, too. I just expect the whole thing is a stack of grifts of various scales, from top to bottom.
Yeah, this is so blatant. The wildly over-valued businesses of the dot-com bubble had valuations of 40 times their annual revenue. No one can claim 1500 times is a serious valuation, especially when the company is losing money 16 times faster than it’s making it and has no plans to change anything (because they can’t).
Typically there are restrictions on the shares themselves. And I think the shares are held in escrow or some such so that they cannot be transferred until the restrictions expire, etc. Pretty sure the SEC would swoop in very fast if somehow these shares were somehow sold.
I’d be pretty surprised if any of the IPO investors manage to get around these standard restrictions. Which is good, because it makes it much much harder for shareholders of these inflated IPOs to get rich on a scam.
I think it’s wrong to view this thing as a stock. The IPO was just a way to funnel large amounts of money into Trump’s control. Truth Social has the money now, so the value of the stock afterwards is irrelevant. But the existance of this donation as a stock enables more scams: If the value goes down, the owners get to claim a tax deduction; if it goes up, they can grift it and get their money back.
If the board waves the restrictions and he manages to cash out, 60% of the shares are sold off and the price crashes, his business is a failure and the business genius emperor is shown to have no clothes before the election.
If he sticks to the 6 month restriction, he could start selling off in September/October just before the election. Maybe that was the plan, a slow sell off over months with most after the election. I doubt he can pass the marshmallow test and delay gratification that long. Plus his legal bills and fundraising failures are eating away at his accounts. He’ll probably panic and cash out.
Or the Saudis or North Koreans can step in and buy up a few billion in stock as an indirect bribe in return for a few leaked files from Mar-A-Lago’s bathrooms.
As far as a shareholder suit, he will delay, delay, delay like his other suits. He probably thinks he will get elected and then declare any shareholders traitors and have them executed or pushed out widows.
Nov 6 would be the perfect day for this stonk to reach penny status.
Nope, because the orange one can sell, and will sell, every share he still owns on the first day he can, six months after the “merger.” They have to be valueless before then or he cashes out. It seems likely the usual suspects will keep it propped up to some degree until then, but one can hope it just hits bottom and keeps going.
This is interesting. I read that Truth Social was threatened with a lawsuit because they were out of compliance with the GPL but have since made their source code available.
But who knows if it’s actually up to date or not. I’m not giving that site any traffic to look for myself.
