Investors voted Tuesday to give the blank check company attempting to take Truth Social public another year to finalize its merger with former President Trump’s media startup, according to reports.

Shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) granted the company a 12-month extension to close the deal with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), just days before its Sept. 8 merger deadline, Axios reported.

This is the company’s second yearlong extension.

If the extension vote had failed, DWAC would have been required to liquidate and return the $300 million it raised to shareholders, according to Reuters.

  • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This was stupid. This is playing Trump’s games by Trump’s rules. When you do that, anyone not named Trump loses money. And lots of it.

    These people simply didn’t want to deal with the fallout (political, financial, and social) that would come with the site being abruptly shut down. Pushing it off for another year is just them not wanting to admit they lost all their money. It means they’re hoping that they can push this off until after the election (which will require another vote) in order to not have to deal with the political and social fallout. This is how Trump wins. He gets everybody in so deep that they feel they can’t get out and the only option available is to do it Trump’s way and hope for the best. And we all know how that works out.

    These people haven’t learned, to paraphrase Joshua from Wargames: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to deal with Trump.”

    What benefit could waiting another year possibly get them? Dollar-Store-Twitter’s only “asset” is Trump himself. If he leaves or simply stops using the site, the site will dry up within days at most. There’s absolutely no source of revenue coming in, and I very seriously doubt that advertisers are going to line up to advertise on Trump’s platform for a site that probably generates about 1% of the traffic in a month that Twitter does in an hour. There is zero value to the site itself. The stock has already lost over 90% of its value, and waiting another year only means that next year’s stockholders will long for the days when their shares were worth $12.

    This wasn’t a vote to extend Trump’s deal. This was a vote to not deal with any of this shit at all for another year.

    • cerevant@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      You are assuming that these investors want a return on their investment. This is just another dark money political op.

      • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. And god knows there’s plenty of stupid in this country to go around.

        We’ve seen countless times when someone with even the slightest amount of name recogntion launches a product that investors think consumers want. There’s all sorts of hype to get in on the ground floor because this time, this idea is going to make all the money, and you don’t want to miss out on that, do you? Then as usual, the product flops, the celebrity quickly distances themselves from the failed product, and a whole bunch of people lose a whole bunch of money.

        That’s all this was.

        Saying that it’s another dark money political op would imply that (a) mega-rich people are just gleefully throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into the void, (b) they don’t already have about eleventy billion other dark money ops going on that are more well established, and © they’re all-in on some dollar-store conspiracy to turn a dime-store Twitter rip-off into the next Fox News in the worst way possible.

        Nah. This is just another example of a bunch of people throwing their money into the Trump Void, then wondering where their money went.

  • NXTR@artemis.camp
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    10 months ago

    I used to work for a wealth management firm who got pre-IPO shares of DWAC. Even with the lockup period, anyone who bought those shares made an incredible amount of money. To anyone who invested at or after the IPO…they’ve lost quite a bit. Just goes to show that being good at investing boils down to having lots of money and knowing the right people. Basically the rich get richer with absolutely no risk while the average person gets fucked to line their pockets.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Investors voted Tuesday to give the blank check company attempting to take Truth Social public another year to finalize its merger with former President Trump’s media startup, according to reports.

    Shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) granted the company a 12-month extension to close the deal with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), just days before its Sept. 8 merger deadline, Axios reported.

    If the extension vote had failed, DWAC would have been required to liquidate and return the $300 million it raised to shareholders, according to Reuters.

    “Thank you for all of the outstanding support,” DWAC CEO Eric Swider said in a Truth Social post Tuesday.

    The merger between DWAC and Truth Social’s parent company has been troubled.

    The Justice Department announced charges against a former DWAC board member and two others in June for insider trading related to the merger, and the company agreed to pay an $18 million fine to settle fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July.


    The original article contains 203 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 19%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!