No. of Recommendations: 4
Per albaby's explanation (and I freely confess I have not checked the company), it appears to be a vehicle to make him look better -financially-, and as a means of accepting bribes if he wins in November.
I don't think there was really that much intentionality behind it.
It might help to differentiate between Truth Social - the underlying business - and DWAC/DJT the publicly traded company. Truth Social started because Trump got kicked off of Twitter and FB, and needed/wanted a replacement. He (correctly) intuited that he brought a decent sized audience with him, and shopped himself around to existing alternatives a bit, but decided he'd get more value for himself if he "started" his "own" social media platform. I use the scare quotes, because he basically just used the open-source Mastodon platform and skinned it for his own brand.
Around that time, SPAC's were becoming very popular as a backdoor way to bring companies public that would never be able to get more formal underwriting. Trump has always been in the business of selling "Trump" to Trump fans, and he almost certainly recognized that a Trump IPO was a good way to do that. So they paired up Truth Social with a SPAC (Digital World Acquisition Corp., or DWAC) and proposed to merge them back in 2021.
This deal was supposed to close back then, but it got held up in a lot of SEC review. Meanwhile, Truth Social's growth fell off as Trump was out of office, the SPAC boom collapsed, and this thing just lingered around for a while. But now Trump's a candidate again, has massive liquidity issues, and the merger finally went through.
So it's a fortuitous coincidence for Trump that all the pieces came together now - and that the market decided to give this thing an initial valuation of many billions of dollars.
