Trump’s dazzling Truth Social SPAC
America’s career conspiracy theorists floated the notion that Taylor Swift would use her mass clout at the Super Bowl to endorse Joe Biden. Coming off a year of astonishing sales for her music and concerts, and with a net worth estimated at $1.1 billion, Ms. Swift presumably was the world’s greatest celebrity moneymaker, until she dropped to No.
2, displaced by Donald J. Trump. Mr.
Trump, the former U.S. president and legal celebrity, increased his net worth last week by nearly $5 billion. Mr.
Trump’s windfall came after his social-media platform, Truth Social, merged with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, called Digital World, and began trading last week on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol DJT. By day’s end, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which had produced only $5 million in sales since its 2021 inception, was worth some $8 billion. As 57% owner of the company, Mr.
Trump’s share-in-a-day gain was more than $4.5 billion. Dazzling. Swiftians might object that her wealth is business profit as normally understood, whereas Mr.
Trump’s Truth Social site until now has produced losses. Who cares about that anymore? The investing world, and its cemetery, is filled with no-profit startups whose initial sky-high valuations turned mostly on hope they might make money. The Trump play is a little different.
Mr. Trump’s financial fireworks confirm an emerging reality. Increasingly the public face of politics belongs to influencers, such as Reps.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who’ve discovered the power and profit of mass online belief. The future of the investments in Mr. Trump’s SPAC turns on one thing: his winning the U.S.
presidency. If he loses, the billions fizzle. The
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