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MockingQuantum posted:Yeah even meme stonk status aside who in their right mind is valuing a Truth Social IPO at $5 billion If a bunch of 'apes' can hold gamestop at orders of magnitude over and above the any reasonable valuation for years based on some fiction about unlimited wealth then they can do it for Truth Social. BUT, I don't think MAGA has that kind of solidarity. They will absolutely try and sell at the peak convinced that the whole world is trying to buy DJT's next super success story and the price will plummet at opening to essentially nothing. I can't even imagine what kind of insane futures contracts the marginally knowledgeable Freep poster is working themselves up to.
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Mar 22, 2024 16:22
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The Gamestop stock was already being traded, and the trick they played was seeing that hedge funds had bet money that the stock would go down, so they pumped the stock up, meaning the hedge funds lost their bet. You can't do the same with this valuation because money isn't being traded yet.
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Mar 22, 2024 16:25
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The Bible posted:I hope you're right, but people have been saying this for a good long while now, and those families haven't gotten poo poo, he has publicly sworn to never give them poo poo, and the courts seem to be doing poo poo-all about it, all while he is spending ungodly amounts of money freely. The amount of money he's spending is tiny compared to the amount of money he brings in and the size of his wealth. And all of the money he's spending is being specifically allotted to him by the court, which literally controls his corporate accounts and decides how much money he's allowed to have. He's not been reduced to rice-and-beans, but almost his entire fortune is inaccessible to him. He's not flaunting the judgment at all - he's literally only able to spend the money that the court specifically tells him he's allowed to spend as he likes. It only looks like nothing's happened because he's so loving rich that he's still able to keep up with most of his basic expenses even with substantial restrictions on his spending, so the impact isn't immediately visible. Incidentally, something somewhat similar happened to Trump once. When his casino empire ran into serious financial trouble back in the late 80s/early 90s, he desperately needed massive loans to stay afloat. The banks bailed him out, but in exchange for that bailout he was forced to cede nearly complete control of his business and personal finances to the bankers until he paid back the loans. Not only were his business operations completely overseen by the banks, but his personal spending was heavily restricted too, except for a relatively small personal allowance that he would be allowed to spend as he pleased. Those restrictions were so onerous that he was forced to sell the yacht he'd bought a couple of years prior, and take a significant loss on it in the process. But on the other hand, while that personal allowance was small compared to his pre-loan personal spending, it was still $450k per month, which incrementally tapered down to $300k a month over the course of a few years. But even though he was getting more spending money per month than most of us make in an entire year, that was still actually a substantial reduction from what he'd been spending before. He was just that loving rich. It's hard for us to imagine the impact of having one's yearly budget cut from $5.4 million to $3.6 million. It's a 33 percent reduction in spending, so there must be some impact on standard-of-living and quality-of-life, but these people fundamentally live in a different financial universe from us. You could cut that budget by another 90% and they'd still be nowhere near "studio apartment in a slum and rice-and-beans-diet" territory, even though it must certainly result in drastic reductions to the amount of money they're able to spend on fun and a substantial reduction on how much upkeep they can afford on the property they own.
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Mar 22, 2024 16:28
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DTurtle posted:If you guys want to figure out how Trump can raise enough money from "various sources" (my interpretation): short version: trump is restricted from selling any of his shares until the fall. it is possible that someone could decide to give him a big loan that is collateralized by those shares, but that's not the kind of loan that comes together the day the new merged company starts trading on the market. if he gets a loan like that within the next week, it will be because some corrupt actor wanted to give him the money and this is just useful pretext for it. longer version effortpost: that "$3 billion" figure that keeps going around is an extremely squishy number mostly powered by hopes and dreams of some MAGA morons with more money than sense, and probably some hedge funds looking to take advantage of those morons. That figure is an estimate based on the pre-merger market cap of Digital World, which is basically acting like a meme stock that's being bid up by people buying into the hype that is completely and utterly devoid of the actual financial performance of the underlying business. Trump Media & Technology aka TMTG (the Truth Social parent company, a private company owned mostly by Trump), which is the entity being merged into Digital World (aka DWAC, the company that is traded on the stock market and which will be ~58% owned by Trump next week), is an absolute turd of a business right now. As of the last filing, it had a couple million in cash on hand against 60 million in debts. For the first 9 months of 2023, it only earned $3 million in revenues while losing $49 million. TMTG's interest payments alone are ten times the amount of revenue it's bringing in. Their last set of audited financials had a "going concern" disclosure, which is when a company's auditors say "hey we're required to tell you that as it stands now, it looks like this company might not have enough cash coming in to keep the lights on for another year." It's not the kind of poo poo that usually gets you a merger with a valuation in the billions! Now, DWAC has a few hundred million in cash so that'll easily plug the holes in TMTG's balance sheet. But it's worth noting that DWAC is not exactly a clean operation either, with its own accounting and regulatory troubles - their original 2021 and 2022 financials were wrong and got restated last year (along with them changing auditors), they've been dealing with shareholder lawsuits, and they've had to settle with the SEC for fuckery and maybe a little dash of insider trading around this merger. I say all that to say this: if you strip the names off of this deal, if you disregard the hype and just look at the figures and the underlying business, it's loving insane to think that this company will be worth the >$5 billion valuation that the headlines are implying. It's like a meme stock or cryptocurrency, in that there's not actually anything remotely worth that there, it's all just a speculative investment bubble borne of hype and name recognition. Obviously those bubbles can stay inflated for a while because people are silly and stupid, but usually, at some point, they come crashing back down - and what generally starts that crash is when someone decides its time to start selling a whole bunch. Which means that if Trump does start dumping stock at some point to raise cash, the price will start falling, and what was once an "estimated $3 billion" in stock will become cash in an amount much less than that. He'll be in a similar (but much smaller scale) position as Elon Musk and Tesla, in that Tesla stock is massively overvalued because of Elon hype, and Elon can't sell much without crashing the stock price and shrinking the main component of his wealth. Musk avoids that somewhat by taking out loans against his Tesla shares instead of selling them, and it's plausible that Trump could do the same... if he can find a lender that actually thinks his company is worth billions and also doesn't care about him being a known financial fraudster who lies about the value of every single thing he owns. tl;dr - that $3 billion figure is an extremely optimistic estimate, the actual amount of cash he could raise with that is probably somewhere between a couple hundred million and that estimate, and there's a lot of complicating factors that will make it difficult for him to cash all that in any time soon. edit: walked away from the computer mid-posting and took too long and missed all those new posts, whoops sorry folks Murgos posted:If a bunch of 'apes' can hold gamestop at orders of magnitude over and above the any reasonable valuation for years based on some fiction about unlimited wealth then they can do it for Truth Social. BUT, I don't think MAGA has that kind of solidarity. They will absolutely try and sell at the peak convinced that the whole world is trying to buy DJT's next super success story and the price will plummet at opening to essentially nothing. Blotto_Otter fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 16:34
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Blotto_Otter posted:if he gets a loan like that within the next week, it will be because some corrupt actor wanted to give him the money and this is just useful pretext for it. isn't that the exact scenario people are worried about?
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Mar 22, 2024 16:57
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:isn't that the exact scenario people are worried about? Yeah, but in this case it would be blatantly obvious to the point of legal peril for some company to give him a loan based on that valuation.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:00
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Retro42 posted:Yeah, but in this case it would be blatantly obvious to the point of legal peril for some company to give him a loan based on that valuation. So like all the other times companies have given him money
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Mar 22, 2024 17:02
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Tesseraction posted:https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1771183548927537459?s=20 He might be able to use them as collateral for a loan though. Edit: Blotto_Otter posted:. if he gets a loan like that within the next week, it will be because some corrupt actor wanted to give him the money and this is just useful pretext for it. Yeah that s fair Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 17:04
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Who's going to take meme stock as collateral? Seems even sketchier than his over-leveraged real estate.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:07
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Yeah I don’t see why some corrupt actor would take this as collateral but not some overvalued properties?
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Mar 22, 2024 17:10
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fool of sound posted:Yeah I don’t see why some corrupt actor would take this as collateral but not some overvalued properties? Presumably all his real estate is already heavily encumbered.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:14
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Tesseraction posted:Oh huh, yeah So, this implies that the 5000 page document Trumps lawyers filed a couple days ago was a complete fabrication? I hope Engoron decides to do something about that.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Presumably all his real estate is already heavily encumbered. I mean, if someone is just looking for an excuse to chuck him a cool half billion they can just drop a lien on any ol' property lower in priority to the existing encumbrances. I imagine that people who want to toss him a cash lifeline don't actually want to just be shoveling a half billion into a fire with no way to get it back though.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:20
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As much as I enjoy seeing Trump's stuff possible lly seized, did no one in NYS actually look at his finances until a few years ago
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Mar 22, 2024 17:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Presumably all his real estate is already heavily encumbered. Very likely this. Particularly for everything Trump is a minority owner only or in a licensing agreement with. In those situations, owners often aren’t allowed to sell or pledge or otherwise transfer ownership of their shares without permission of a majority of all owners, so that the ownership as a whole can always control the coalition. Think of it like owning ten percent of a sports franchise - yes you own it, but you can’t easily use it to back a loan; neither Bank of America nor MLB want BoA to be running a baseball team.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:22
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:As much as I enjoy seeing Trump's stuff possible lly seized, did no one in NYS actually look at his finances until a few years ago It’s been known forever that he’s a fraud, broke, and full of poo poo but only in the nyc circles. Everyone that mattered knew not to bother with him, and until he ran for president he wasn’t worth going after because he’s broke and he’d drag poo poo out forever. This was actually a weakness of the Hillary campaign because she (and the rest of her useless campaign team) thought the rest of the country felt the same way. In New York City trump is a joke because he tried to sell scam steaks in sharper image. To the rest of the country he’s the businessman on tv who was in every magazine and always speaks like he knows what he’s talking about. Now that trump has become the biggest political force since like Obama, it’s worth going atet him. Whoever final nails him has their career made, will sell their memoirs, will win whatever they run for etc. I’d say he has no one to blame but himself but he lacks even that small amount of insight. Hell, if he’d had just gone away after 2020 all these trials would likely as well. But, well, he is who he is.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:28
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so this appears to be the actual lockup agreement that Trump will be under, and while this is getting out of accounting territory and into legal territory, and I'm no lawyer... I think he may be prohibited from using these shares as collateral to get a loan? (conceptually that makes sense I think - if you didn't prohibit that as well as selling, someone clever could come up with a loan structure that would be more or less equivalent to a sale in practice.) I've seen reporting that there is a mechanism by which this lockup period can be waived, but I can't find that spelled out here (but again, not a lawyer). if that's true, perhaps this happens sooner than 6 months from now, but 1) at the absolute earliest that can't happen until sometime after Monday, and 2) if would require someone (board members or shareholders, I'm not clear on it) placing the MAGA cause above everything else and voting against their own financial interests, which is possible, but these people are often greedy bastards first and Trump devotees second, so who knows. edit: ok, there is a clause in there saying anything in that agreement can be waived with "the written consent of the Purchaser, the Purchaser Representative and Holder", which I think are DWAC, Arc Global Investments, and Trump. I'm sure there's a lot of details and caveats to how that actually happens in practice, but I'll leave that to the lawyers. Blotto_Otter fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 17:36
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Blotto_Otter posted:so this appears to be the actual lockup agreement that Trump will be under, and while this is getting out of accounting territory and into legal territory, and I'm no lawyer... I think he may be prohibited from using these shares as collateral to get a loan? (conceptually that makes sense I think - if you didn't prohibit that as well as selling, someone clever could come up with a loan structure that would be more or less equivalent to a sale in practice.) I recall reading that some of the shareholders are already suing the others over something so I have to imagine this whole thing is actually more dysfunctional that it appears.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:40
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Murgos posted:I recall reading that some of the shareholders are already suing the others over something so I have to imagine this whole thing is actually more dysfunctional that it appears. It's Truth Social, of course it's more dysfunctional than it appears.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:43
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Murgos posted:I recall reading that some of the shareholders are already suing the others over something so I have to imagine this whole thing is actually more dysfunctional that it appears. Yeah, I've read that too but I haven't seen a clear account of who the parties are and what the disputes are. Some folks seemed to think that today's shareholder vote might not go Trump's way this morning as a result, but I guess someone got talked into it. Anything's possible but I suspect someone with a say in the matter will be more interested in keeping Trump tied to the mast as long as possible rather than let Trump have a fire sale of stock and tank the market cap.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:44
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Blotto_Otter posted:I haven't seen a clear account of who the parties are and what the disputes are. Evergreen quote about everything Trump and politics related
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Mar 22, 2024 18:04
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Murgos posted:So, this implies that the 5000 page document Trumps lawyers filed a couple days ago was a complete fabrication? I hope Engoron decides to do something about that. then sent his lawyers to court to fight the FOIA requests because twitter isn't real life. trump's lawyers won. so trump tweeted "it's a shame they won't release the russia related documents the deep state is hiding them i again call for them to be released IMMEDIATELY!!" then sent his lawyers to fight all FOIA requests again, arguing again that twitter isn't real life again. and winning, again.
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Mar 22, 2024 18:14
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bird food bathtub posted:Fair warning, I may have details wrong. From listening to Knowledge Fight episodes the parents offered to settle with him on some truly insultingly low value compared to the total judgement, like not even 10%. Jones just had to continue being his usual obstinate dickhead self, screamed about witch hunts crisis actors deep state antifa Illuminati plants and unfair trials or some poo poo and it never went anywhere. The last few episodes though he's been getting noticeably more drunk on-air and frequently not even showing up. When he does it's 50/50 whether he'll cold read more head lines that mean the exact opposite of his point, or spiral into rage or depression about how bad he's being hosed and the revenge he'll get one day. Yeah, I haven't been paying attention to Jones for my own sanity but he seemed the type to start entering a depression spiral once he finally had to face actual, serious and permanent repercussions for his actions and find out that there was, in fact, a bigger fish about. I look forward to Trump entering such a state if NY actually starts carving out bits of his empire.
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Mar 22, 2024 20:12
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InsertPotPun posted:trump tweeted out "i hereby umnclassiofy all russia related documents to be distributed IMMEDIATELY!!!" I love how I can’t tell if you’re joking or not
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Mar 22, 2024 20:18
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Alkydere posted:Yeah, I haven't been paying attention to Jones for my own sanity but he seemed the type to start entering a depression spiral once he finally had to face actual, serious and permanent repercussions for his actions and find out that there was, in fact, a bigger fish about. Nah, Trump won't get depressed, it'll be rage and calling for violence. Again.
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Mar 22, 2024 20:25
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/30/trump-tweets-judges-doj-lawyers-foia-lawsuits/2197524002/quote:“Because the president’s tweet amounts to speculation, it does not” require agencies to acknowledge whether documents exist, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled in a case concerning whether Trump was under investigation. quote:Those conclusions – that the president’s statements on national security are not always to be taken literally or to be trusted – are legal victories for his Justice Department, which has argued repeatedly that the president’s public comments are no reason to force the government to divulge its national security secrets.
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Mar 22, 2024 20:26
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Blotto_Otter posted:longer version effortpost: that "$3 billion" figure that keeps going around is an extremely squishy number mostly powered by hopes and dreams of some MAGA morons with more money than sense, and probably some hedge funds looking to take advantage of those morons. That figure is an estimate based on the pre-merger market cap of Digital World, which is basically acting like a meme stock that's being bid up by people buying into the hype that is completely and utterly devoid of the actual financial performance of the underlying business. As I understand it, DWAC is a special purpose acquisition company, which has no underlying business apart from finding companies to buy. And I was going to question who are the shareholders and why they aren't suing the hell out of the board of directors for this turd of a merger, but the shareholders themselves just voted to approve it, and I can't imagine why. Do they really think it's going to attract that many more users if Trump gets elected or something?
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Mar 22, 2024 20:51
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Hobologist posted:As I understand it, DWAC is a special purpose acquisition company, which has no underlying business apart from finding companies to buy. And I was going to question who are the shareholders and why they aren't suing the hell out of the board of directors for this turd of a merger, but the shareholders themselves just voted to approve it, and I can't imagine why. Do they really think it's going to attract that many more users if Trump gets elected or something? It’s a meme stock, its value has no rational basis but it’s still value. If you can sell into a bunch of idiot magas exhorting each other to HODL on Reddit that’s still money
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Mar 22, 2024 20:55
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haveblue posted:It’s a meme stock, its value has no rational basis but it’s still value. If you can sell into a bunch of idiot magas exhorting each other to HODL on Reddit that’s still money Apparently DWAC's majority owner is Jeff Yass. Strangely enough, Trump changed policy positions on a number of things that Yass wants. https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1771254154435981426
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Mar 22, 2024 21:02
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Jeffery of YassPos??
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Mar 22, 2024 21:08
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Hobologist posted:As I understand it, DWAC is a special purpose acquisition company, which has no underlying business apart from finding companies to buy. And I was going to question who are the shareholders and why they aren't suing the hell out of the board of directors for this turd of a merger, but the shareholders themselves just voted to approve it, and I can't imagine why. Do they really think it's going to attract that many more users if Trump gets elected or something? I'm not 100% sure if DWAC falls into this category, but there is a whole category of publicly listed companies that exist just to get listed and then merge with another company, letting them get on the market much faster.
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Mar 22, 2024 21:40
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Morrow posted:I'm not 100% sure if DWAC falls into this category, but there is a whole category of publicly listed companies that exist just to get listed and then merge with another company, letting them get on the market much faster. Pretty sure this is the case based on other reporting I've read
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Mar 22, 2024 21:42
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Hobologist posted:As I understand it, DWAC is a special purpose acquisition company, which has no underlying business apart from finding companies to buy. And I was going to question who are the shareholders and why they aren't suing the hell out of the board of directors for this turd of a merger, but the shareholders themselves just voted to approve it, and I can't imagine why. Do they really think it's going to attract that many more users if Trump gets elected or something? yeah, DWAC is a SPAC, and when it was first spun up, the initial shareholders bought in at a little over $10/share, which (at 30 million shares issued), put in a bit over $300 million into the company that was to be used in an acquisition or merger. And that's pretty much all DWAC is right now - a shell company with $300 million in cash. But the thing is, this merger between DWAC and TMTG has been in the works since 2021, and people have already been buying and selling DWAC shares ever since then as speculation on whether or not this deal would close. You are sane, so you look at the vote to approve the merger and think "why on earth would we blow $300 million in cold hard cash on a lovely social media site that's got basically zero revenue, is already ~$60 million in debt with no assets, and losing another $60 million a year"? But DWAC shareholders (who are all either MAGA diehards or opportunistic vultures) viewed the merger vote as either "cancel the merger and watch my $40 shares instantly crash back down to $10, with no backup plan for a different merger", or "approve the merger and hope there's enough rubes out there that believe TRUMP TWITTER must be worth billions because it's the only place for genius posts from Donald Trump" This thing really is acting more like a meme stock or cryptocurrency, where there's basically nothing there except a really stupid idea, but its a really stupid idea that a whole lot of really stupid people think is worth money, therefore it might be worth money. It doesn't make sense but the Gamestop bubble didn't make sense and cryptocurrencies didn't make sense and yet some people still made money off of those. DWAC shareholders voted for the merger because they are all either MAGA diehards doing this all for love of TRUMP, or they're cynical gamblers thinking that they can make money off of the MAGA diehards doing this all for love of trump. Morrow posted:I'm not 100% sure if DWAC falls into this category, but there is a whole category of publicly listed companies that exist just to get listed and then merge with another company, letting them get on the market much faster. Blotto_Otter fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 21:51
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Morrow posted:I'm not 100% sure if DWAC falls into this category, but there is a whole category of publicly listed companies that exist just to get listed and then merge with another company, letting them get on the market much faster. Unsurprisingly, companies’ stocks taken public via a SPAC tend to perform terribly.
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Mar 22, 2024 21:53
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dr_rat posted:Says RNC gets a cut after legal fees. Hahaha, there is absolutely no possibility RNC gets a cut whatever happens. It's funnier than that. Every individual who donates to the joint fundraising vehicle (that is, trying to donate to RNC) will first donate the legal maximum directly to Trump's campaign, then the legal maximum to Trump's legal fee slush fund, and then everything above that goes to RNC. The person detailing the plan to press said that it's not that bad because if you donate $800k to the RNC, then almost all of the money actually goes to the RNC, and only a little bit goes to Trump. Lol.
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Mar 22, 2024 21:55
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this AP article is probably the best layman's summary that I've seen yet on the DWAC merger, and this is my favorite detail:quote:The stock will continue to trade under Digital World’s ticker, DWAC, possibly for a couple of days to a couple of weeks, experts say. Then at some point, companies in SPAC deals usually announce that their stock will begin trading under the new ticker symbol. rereading this summary also made me realize the $3 billion figure is even more bullshit than I realized. they're taking today's share price of ~$40, and multiplying it by the number of shares Trump will have post-merger (roughly 73 million). That's reported as a 58% stake in the company, which implies that there will be roughly 135 million shares outstanding next week. Problem is, as of today, there are only ~37 million shares of DWAC outstanding. They're gonna issue a whole bunch of new shares as part of the merger, and the thing about issuing a whole bunch of new shares in an existing company is... the price per share does not stay the same when you do that!
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Mar 22, 2024 22:25
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Blotto_Otter posted:
Lmao amazing, amazing. And even if Trump lasts out the lockout period, he can't very well dump his 60% without tanking it I'm guessing there is smart money out there shorting that one
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Mar 22, 2024 22:44
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mdemone posted:I'm guessing there is smart money out there shorting that one otoh, meme stock owners will love the idea of squeezing another institutional investor short
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Mar 22, 2024 22:47
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So what is everyone going to get when the RNC has to have a fire sale post Trump? I'm hoping to get a good deal on some lecterns.
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Mar 22, 2024 22:49
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Lammasu posted:So what is everyone going to get when the RNC has to have a fire sale post Trump? I'm hoping to get a good deal on some lecterns. I wonder how long after Trump exits the stage before the RNC starts claiming that he was a dem agent all along
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Mar 22, 2024 22:54
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