As in a thrilling TV series, Donald Trump is preparing to return to the field. A press release announced the imminent launch of a new social network that will be called Truth, Truth, which said by someone who spent four years in the White House shooting every color, sounds like a hoax but it’s not. With this move, not only does Trump let us imagine his reapplication for the presidential elections of 2024, but in the meantime he tries to occupy an important part of the playing field: the one where the increasingly numerous opponents of Big Tech, or of the large Silicon Valley companies, are. notably Facebook and Twitter which expelled him after the infamous assault on the US Congress by a group of his supporters on January 6 (but where several Taliban exponents can still communicate, complains Trump).
The launch of a new social network by the former president appears extravagant but should not be underestimated. Trump in his long entrepreneurial career is not new to bombastic announcements that behind them had less substance than they promised, but in this case it must be said that Trump starts with a financial move that according to some observers allows him to immediately spend about 300 million dollars to build Truth.
In fact, the company behind it, the Trump Media and Technology Group, has simultaneously merged with another company, the Digital World Acquisition, a vehicle created specifically to raise money from investors on the stock exchange while waiting for the right opportunity. These companies are called SPAC and are like a blank check waiting for a beneficiary. In fact, it has been a practice that has been in use for just over a year. Digital World Acquisition was founded in Miami a month after Trump left the White House; the company started the paperwork to go public on Wall Street last spring and sold some shares a month ago, raising $ 283 million to which must be added 11 million obtained from private investors. This brings us to 294 million dollars in the coffers of a company waiting for a project to invest in. How is it possible? According to New York Times, which has analyzed the matter in every public detail, behind the Digital World there are some bigwigs of Wall Street and among these different hedge funds such as DE Shaw, Highbridge Capital Management, Lighthouse Partners and Saba Capital Management (all hold shares of DWA). The CEO, with 18 per cent of the shares, is called Patrick F. Orlando, a former member of Deutsche Bank, an expert in innovative financial instruments, such as derivatives; the head of the financial part is Luis Orleans-Braganza, descendant of a royal family, member of the Brazilian Parliament, a figure very close to President Bolsonaro of whom he should have made the deputy but an alleged scandal would have led him to give up.
These are the backers of Trump’s “truth” that under this merger there is about $ 300 million to spend and already boasts a billion dollar valuation ($ 1.7 billion) for his TMTG. These are figures that must all be verified on the ground, but in the meantime Trump has already taken possession of the most important word, the one that he himself has mistreated the most: truth. It must be said that even with us it is not in very good hands.
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