Is Truth Social another of Trump’s bungled businesses?

theguardian.com:

It takes a brave investor to go into business with Donald Trump.

The former president’s hotels and casinos have declared bankruptcy six times. Trump’s short-lived airline crashed. He paid out millions of dollars to settle multiple lawsuits for running an unlicensed “university” that the conservative National Review called a “massive scam”. And then there is the Trump Organization’s looming criminal trial for tax fraud.

For all that, a business built around Trump’s famed ability to rile up millions of people online must have seemed a good bet to those who poured money into backing the company behind his rival to Twitter, Truth Social.

Now that too has run into trouble as more than a billion dollars in investment has stalled amid shareholder hesitation and a federal investigation into whether Trump Media and Technology Group broke the law in its dealings with a company set up to provide the money.

As so often with the former president, it’s not immediately clear what is going on.

Trump launched Truth Social in February after he was thrown off of Twitter for inciting violence after he lost the presidential election. He previously ran a blog, From the Desk of Donald Trump, but it shut down after less than a month because almost no one was reading it.

Truth Social has fared better as a vehicle for Trump to rile his base and rage against his enemies, and for white nationalists and others on the far right to say what they cannot on Twitter. But it has failed to generate the kind of reach enjoyed by other social media platforms.

Trump has about 4 million followers on Truth Social compared with 80 million on Twitter, in part because its reach has been limited by a ban by Google’s app store for failing to take down posts making physical