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The Truth Social deal has to be a money laundering scheme for TFG. The financials just don't support it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-truth-social-spac-stock-value-djt/Former President Donald Trump will soon be at the helm of a publicly traded company that will trade under the ticker "DJT," after his initials, and boast a potential valuation of more than $5 billion — a lofty amount for a business that's losing money and has scant revenue.
Trump's next career move as head of a publicly traded company comes after shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), a so-called blank-check company, also known as a SPAC, approved a merger on Friday morning with the Trump Media & Technology Group. With the nod, DWAC will combine with Trump Media & Technology Group and could soon begin trading under the latter name.
Typically, investors put their money into companies they believe will provide solid returns for their investment, though time-honored fundamentals such as profit and revenue growth, dividends and share appreciation. But Trump Media's main business, Truth Social, is a social media platform that is lagging rivals such as Facebook and "X" (formerly Twitter), with scant revenue and mounting losses, according to regulatory filings.
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A year after the IPO party, Premiere went bust, having lost $7 million. During the final months, printers went unpaid, the power was turned off, and paychecks bounced, as a former Trump magazine receptionist recounted in Politico last August. But more intriguing than the disarray in the editorial office was Premiere’s penny stock structure – which has not been explored during Trump’s presidential campaign.
A spokesperson for the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment for this story, but three experts reviewed Premiere’s operations at Fusion’s request. Jeremy Hyndman, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents victims of penny stock fraud, examined some of Premiere’s SEC filings. He said the company had hallmarks “of a pretty classic pump-and-dump” scheme, in which insiders inflate a company’s share price and cash in before it crashes. Joseph Borg, the securities commissioner of Alabama – who helped bring down Jordan Belfort, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street – emphasized that he had no first-hand knowledge of Premiere, but called the company’s patterns “very suspicious.”
Jacob S. Frenkel, a former SEC investigator who serves as an expert witness in stock manipulation cases, said Premiere raised “red flags that would’ve caused me to investigate.” But, he added, “Absent an investigation, it is impossible to conclude that there was a manipulation.” And the statute of limitations, he said, has long since passed.
Filings with the SEC show that before its IPO, more than a third of Premiere Publishing’s stock was put into untraceable overseas shell companies. Investors say they were cold-called by brokers and bought stock because of Trump’s involvement. In a newsletter, a promoter hyped Premiere, dangling returns of “500% or even more.” In press releases, the company promised a lucrative Trump cartoon TV show that lifted the stock price but never materialized. (In one episode, Trump was to run for president and save America.) Numerous people associated with Premiere ran into separate trouble with financial regulators.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211210120012/https://fusion.tv/story/360908/trump-magazine-boiler-room-stock/
A spokesperson for the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment for this story, but three experts reviewed Premiere’s operations at Fusion’s request. Jeremy Hyndman, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents victims of penny stock fraud, examined some of Premiere’s SEC filings. He said the company had hallmarks “of a pretty classic pump-and-dump” scheme, in which insiders inflate a company’s share price and cash in before it crashes. Joseph Borg, the securities commissioner of Alabama – who helped bring down Jordan Belfort, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street – emphasized that he had no first-hand knowledge of Premiere, but called the company’s patterns “very suspicious.”
Jacob S. Frenkel, a former SEC investigator who serves as an expert witness in stock manipulation cases, said Premiere raised “red flags that would’ve caused me to investigate.” But, he added, “Absent an investigation, it is impossible to conclude that there was a manipulation.” And the statute of limitations, he said, has long since passed.
Filings with the SEC show that before its IPO, more than a third of Premiere Publishing’s stock was put into untraceable overseas shell companies. Investors say they were cold-called by brokers and bought stock because of Trump’s involvement. In a newsletter, a promoter hyped Premiere, dangling returns of “500% or even more.” In press releases, the company promised a lucrative Trump cartoon TV show that lifted the stock price but never materialized. (In one episode, Trump was to run for president and save America.) Numerous people associated with Premiere ran into separate trouble with financial regulators.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211210120012/https://fusion.tv/story/360908/trump-magazine-boiler-room-stock/
The catalyst for that idea was Mitchell Schultz, a former New Yorker who is now a “space tourism consultant” in Florida. Schultz tells Fusion he knew Trump Magazine’s publisher, Michael Jacobson, and had met Trump at a party through their mutual friend. Schultz remembers telling Jacobson that “the way to create immortality for Donald Trump is through the youth of America.” (Jacobson did not respond to requests for comment.)
Schultz imagined a show tentatively called Trump Takeover. Plotlines—which Schultz developed with the help of a writer friend, Louis Cimino—were prescient. They imagined an episode in which America would be “in a state of virtual collapse,” according to draft materials for the show.
Trump and his team—including characters from The Apprentice—would “go to Washington to take over!” In another episode, Trump and team would seize control of the stock market to save the world:
...
“They wanted to project Donald Trump as a superhero who does all the right things, and he is saving everyone,” Koshy recalls. Her animators designed a Trump with “a magical halo around him,” and started on a TV pilot.But, like so many contractors who’ve done work for Trump, Koshy says she was stiffed on the pay. She said she had to pester Jacobson for payment, and only got $6,000—two-thirds of what she was owed—after threatening to go public with her allegations of non-payment. Unfortunately, she says, neither she nor her colleagues in India kept copies of their drawings.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211210094600/https://fusion.tv/story/361280/trump-tv-cartoon-exclusive-images/
Schultz imagined a show tentatively called Trump Takeover. Plotlines—which Schultz developed with the help of a writer friend, Louis Cimino—were prescient. They imagined an episode in which America would be “in a state of virtual collapse,” according to draft materials for the show.
Trump and his team—including characters from The Apprentice—would “go to Washington to take over!” In another episode, Trump and team would seize control of the stock market to save the world:
...
“They wanted to project Donald Trump as a superhero who does all the right things, and he is saving everyone,” Koshy recalls. Her animators designed a Trump with “a magical halo around him,” and started on a TV pilot.But, like so many contractors who’ve done work for Trump, Koshy says she was stiffed on the pay. She said she had to pester Jacobson for payment, and only got $6,000—two-thirds of what she was owed—after threatening to go public with her allegations of non-payment. Unfortunately, she says, neither she nor her colleagues in India kept copies of their drawings.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211210094600/https://fusion.tv/story/361280/trump-tv-cartoon-exclusive-images/
Sadly, images aren't archived there. This is the best I can find so far
Schultz’s pitch for the show, as he related it to Fusion’s Penn Bullock ten years later, was that “the way to create immortality for Donald Trump is through the youth of America.” Schultz, working with the writer Louis Cimino and a Long Island ad agency named Creativity Zone, roughed out a number of episodes. One found Trump and his management team taking control of the New York Yankees, who were then cruising to their ninth straight American League East title, and righting the ship; Creativity Zone’s title card for that one reads, “As Major League Baseball begins a downward slide to oblivion ... Trump and his team take over to protect the great American pastime!” Another begins with Trump and his squad “uncovering a global financial conspiracy” and ends with them triumphantly taking control of the stock market “to save the world economy from total ruin.” A third, “Politically Corrected,” begins with “America ... in a state of virtual collapse,” which is remedied when “Trump and his team go to Washington to take over!”
As Schultz recalls, his simple formula for the show proved compelling enough for Jacobson to buy into it: “Trump was taking over everything and making it better.” Jacobson hired a California-based animator named Elizabeth Koshy to improve upon Creativity Zone’s vision for the show; she in turn hired a team of animators in India. Koshy delivered on concepts that included a superheroic rendering of Trump. It took the animator nearly a year to get two-thirds of her agreed-upon fee out of Jacobson—stiffing contractors being another well-documented feature of all Trump-themed business endeavors. It seems likely, in retrospect, that Jacobson believed in Schultz’s vision primarily as a vehicle to enhance the returns on a pump-and-dump scheme he was building around Premiere.
“Behind the handcrafted mahogany doors of his gold-accented boardroom, legendary deal maker Donald Trump has taken ACTIVE PARTICIPATION in a very secret venture,” a Florida stock creep named James Rapholz wrote in the October 2006 edition of his newsletter Economic Advice. Rapholz had received a ten-year Securities and Exchange Commission ban for financial fraud in 1991, but was by then back in the game. “Act now before the word gets out and you could find yourself making an astounding profit of 500% or more in the next 18 months in … ‘TRUMP’S SECRET DEAL.’” The Premiere stock was, Rapholz wrote, “the closest thing I’ve seen to a sure thing.” Cold callers duly made similar pitches over the phone.
Small upward fluctuations in price create the value that penny-stock scammers use to make these sorts of scams work. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story noted that the news of an upcoming prime-time Trump cartoon series—Rapholz claimed that Disney was involved, while Premiere stuck to a more noncommittal statement fantasizing “interest from major animation houses and television networks”—caused Premiere’s stock to jump in value, briefly, by 30 percent. Jacobson had given Trump 1.675 million shares, as well as nearly a million dollars in licensing fees. When The Wall Street Journal’s John R. Emshwiller and Peter Sanders asked him about it in October 2006, Trump first claimed that he didn’t know how he’d come to own those shares, but later said he’d agreed to acquire them. “Michael is a good guy,” he added. By the time Premiere Publishing went bust in September 2007, after Trump terminated his licensing agreement with the company, Trump had received at least $855,000 in licensing fees.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154100/making-sense-donald-trump-petulant-presidency
As Schultz recalls, his simple formula for the show proved compelling enough for Jacobson to buy into it: “Trump was taking over everything and making it better.” Jacobson hired a California-based animator named Elizabeth Koshy to improve upon Creativity Zone’s vision for the show; she in turn hired a team of animators in India. Koshy delivered on concepts that included a superheroic rendering of Trump. It took the animator nearly a year to get two-thirds of her agreed-upon fee out of Jacobson—stiffing contractors being another well-documented feature of all Trump-themed business endeavors. It seems likely, in retrospect, that Jacobson believed in Schultz’s vision primarily as a vehicle to enhance the returns on a pump-and-dump scheme he was building around Premiere.
“Behind the handcrafted mahogany doors of his gold-accented boardroom, legendary deal maker Donald Trump has taken ACTIVE PARTICIPATION in a very secret venture,” a Florida stock creep named James Rapholz wrote in the October 2006 edition of his newsletter Economic Advice. Rapholz had received a ten-year Securities and Exchange Commission ban for financial fraud in 1991, but was by then back in the game. “Act now before the word gets out and you could find yourself making an astounding profit of 500% or more in the next 18 months in … ‘TRUMP’S SECRET DEAL.’” The Premiere stock was, Rapholz wrote, “the closest thing I’ve seen to a sure thing.” Cold callers duly made similar pitches over the phone.
Small upward fluctuations in price create the value that penny-stock scammers use to make these sorts of scams work. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story noted that the news of an upcoming prime-time Trump cartoon series—Rapholz claimed that Disney was involved, while Premiere stuck to a more noncommittal statement fantasizing “interest from major animation houses and television networks”—caused Premiere’s stock to jump in value, briefly, by 30 percent. Jacobson had given Trump 1.675 million shares, as well as nearly a million dollars in licensing fees. When The Wall Street Journal’s John R. Emshwiller and Peter Sanders asked him about it in October 2006, Trump first claimed that he didn’t know how he’d come to own those shares, but later said he’d agreed to acquire them. “Michael is a good guy,” he added. By the time Premiere Publishing went bust in September 2007, after Trump terminated his licensing agreement with the company, Trump had received at least $855,000 in licensing fees.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154100/making-sense-donald-trump-petulant-presidency
What you can do with a magazine and cartoon 20 years ago, you can do with social media today.
