There is yet another new business hurdle around the struggling social media operation led, on one end, by Donald Trump.
A Trump-branded company currently operates the alternative social media platform Truth Social, and that company, the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), has long been aiming to merge with a blank-check firm called Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC). DWAC’s leadership had assembled $1 billion in investment commitments that would have supported the combined DWAC and TMTG operation once the sought deal was actually finalized, and new reporting outlines that those investment plans are, well, all over.
As the merger process dragged on, interests who’d made investment commitments already had the opportunity to cancel their plans once early timing targets were missed, and before the latest updates, DWAC already lost $467 million in promised investments. Now, the rest has also been undone, though those responsible at either DWAC or TMTG, the latter of which is 90 percent held by Trump himself, weren’t exactly forthcoming with the reasoning behind pulling the rhetorical plug on what remained.
Former GOP Congressman Devin Nunes, who’s CEO at Trump’s namesake firm, called the investment cancellations “in the best interest of TMTG’s equity holders and completing our merger with DWAC as soon as possible.” It’s unclear how that’s actually the case. A spokesperson for the Trump company “did not respond to a question on why terminating the PIPE ahead of the merger was positive for TMTG,” Reuters said earlier this week.
DWAC, a publicly traded company, still leans on money raised in an initial public offering. Some other notable and recent news from this area was a report in Forbes that the value of Trump’s holdings at his social media company had plummeted, per their numbers, by some $630 million, helping drive the financial news publication’s removal of the ex-president from their list of the most wealthy 400 individuals in the United States.
