Photo-Illustration: Pablo Delcan
What may turn out to be a hinge in American history occurs one day in November 2004, when the future president of the United States asks his then-girlfriend to turn around so the nation can see how her ass looks in a pair of jeans.
The occasion is season two, episode 11, of The Apprentice. Two teams have been tasked with creating an ad campaign for Levi’s, and one side has come up with a catalogue bereft of butt shots. Donald Trump is steamed. “Jeans are supposed to show off the body,” he fumes back in the boardroom, after Melania has done a twirl for the camera. “In particular, they are supposed to show off the ass. How come you didn’t show off that part of the body?”
The answer is Maria. Maria works for a real-estate investment trust and was once called a control freak by her teammate Sandy, a bridal-shop owner. The other two members of the group can only look on helplessly: Wes Moss, a blond and bland young man from Atlanta whom internet commentators have nicknamed No Defining Characteristics Wes, and Andy Dean Litinsky, a Harvard-educated debate champion who introduced himself to viewers by expressing his love of bow ties because “those things are P-I-M-P.” It was Maria who came up with the photo-shoot concept but then took too long and wasn’t satisfied enough with any of the derrière shots to use them.
But really, the fault lies with Wes. He’s the team leader. Trump fires him, and he fires Maria — the first double firing in the show’s history. He turns to Wes’s buddy and says, “Andy, you keep escaping because somebody else is more incompetent.”
Fast-forward past what, let’s all agree, is a rather remarkable turn of events. It’s 2020. Moss has become a certified financial planner and the author of books with titles like You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think. Litinsky is part of the wider Trump orbit. He’s worked as president of Trump Productions, the studio behind the Miss Universe pageant, sometimes popping up on CNN to defend his old boss. For example, he downplays Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” tape by pointing out that the Clinton Foundation took money from Saudi Arabia, so who is Hillary Clinton to talk about how women should be treated, anyway.
The two men have kept in touch, and just after Trump loses the election to Joe Biden, Moss invites Litinsky to Atlanta to hear about his new idea: the Super Shaker Latte Maker, a gadget to end the scourge of inadequately frothed milk in home-brewed specialty coffee. Litinsky brings along his business partner, Will Wilkerson. The three men go out for Italian food to talk about it. Walking over, Litinsky says the Super Shaker Latte Maker is great and all, but there’s been something else on his mind over the past couple of days, burning such a hole in his cranium that he can’t even sleep. Their old boss will soon be back in the private sector. What if they could take Donald Trump himself public?
The entity that exists because of that thought — ticker symbol DJT, last price $31.45 — is something unprecedented in financial or political history. It represents a company, Trump Media & Technology Group, that has a single product, the social-networking platform Truth Social. The business operates at a staggering loss and is widely considered worthless. But the stock, DJT, has a market capitalization of roughly $6 billion. That’s the same as Alcoa. Its value is purely a proxy for Trump’s political power.
He controls a 58.7 percent stake. It’s an incredible dynamic — a presidential candidate is the majority owner of a publicly traded instrument that tracks his political fortunes, soon to result in a literal fortune that he can use any way he likes. Trump is temporarily barred from selling his shares, but when that restriction expires in September, he can begin to turn his paper gains into real ones. He can pay off what once appeared to be punishingly large legal penalties in a stroke, fund the home stretch of his campaign, or simply pocket the money. The board, which is packed with his allies, including Donald Trump Jr. and Linda McMahon, can also make moves that enrich him faster. The stock as a story line has been largely overshadowed by the 2024 campaign’s relentless sequence of megaevents, from criminal trials to Supreme Court bombshells to Biden’s withdrawal to Kamala Harris’s charging onto the field, but it has been there all along, surging and cratering and enabling previously unimaginable behavior.
At noon on Monday, July 15, a Reddit user called Biotot posted an item to r/wallstreetbets with a title that was unintelligible to the median civilian: “+200% Deep OOTM DJT options over the weekend.” There was no body text, just a screenshot of his trading account. It showed a list of 18 securities — options contracts that would allow him to sell shares of Trump’s company at prices so far above their present value that they’re considered “deep out of the money.” After Trump narrowly escaped having his head blown apart by an assault rifle in Butler, Pennsylvania, they soared in value; the options gained even more than the underlying stock. Biotot’s headline, translated into plain English: I tripled my money trading an assassination attempt.
In the comments, after other redditors suggested he should prepare for a visit from the FBI and Secret Service, Biotot clarified that he hadn’t had any advance knowledge of the attempt on Trump’s life. He’d been preparing for big price swings in both directions, buying an indiscriminate array of options at opportune prices for months. “Lmao,” he wrote.
r/wallstreetbets is the forum where, three years ago, proudly bottom-feeding retail investors rewrote the rules of speculative investing by sending the video-game chain GameStop to the moon more or less on a whim. Similar mobs have since made billions of dollars accrue to meme stocks like AMC and Bed Bath & Beyond, and now there’s an army making (and losing) surprising sums on the price swings of Trump Media. Some are in it for troll value, some are true believers in Trump the politician, and some are coldblooded investment professionals who see money on the table.
All year, the stock has been highly volatile, quadrupling in value, then halving, doubling, halving, and spiking again. Staring at a price chart in search of meaning can often be like divining shapes in the clouds, but in the case of Trump Media, the fluctuations become highly legible when mapped against campaign headlines and SEC filings. The four largest daily gains all followed good political news for Trump. (When he won the Iowa caucuses, when Ron DeSantis quit the race, when a court reduced his civil-fraud penalty by $279 million, and when much of the nation rallied around him after the shooting.) Conversely, four of the five largest daily losses followed bad business news for Trump Media. There is, in other words, a tug-of-war between those betting Trump will retake the White House and market rationalists who can’t get past his company’s fundamental lack of value.
In May, Trump Media announced quarterly revenue of $770,500 and losses of $328 million. “It’s a company that essentially has the revenue of not even a medium-size McDonald’s franchise,” says John Rekenthaler, a researcher at Morningstar. “To those of us who are outside the MAGA bubble, it’s bizarre. It is this tiny business that is going nowhere.” Jay Ritter, an expert on public financing and an economics professor at the University of Florida, describes Trump Media and Truth Social as “amazingly unsuccessful.” He says, “This had a brand name, so it was differentiated from the run-of-the-mill start-up social-media companies. But they have not come up with a successful business model that has generated content, generated advertising revenue, generated paying subscribers. Or even nonpaying subscribers, for that matter.” The company has indicated it wants to expand into new areas, but few expect it will do any better. When Trump Media announced a plan to get into streaming, a business that tends to burn cash, the stock dropped 14 percent.
At times, Trump Media has been the market’s single-most-expensive stock to short, or bet against. On Wall Street, there has long been a nearly unanimous assumption that Trump will begin to liquidate his position as soon as he is able, leaving his supporters holding increasingly worthless shares. But his ongoing strength in the polls and the stock’s corresponding persistence now point to another possibility: that he will return to office and retain his multibillion-dollar stake. And that’s where things would get truly uncharted.
While watchdog groups and congressional Democrats might see Trump holding shares of DJT as president as a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, they would likely struggle to find a viable way to object, save another impeachment. Meanwhile, the arrangement would open up unprecedented channels for corruption. Especially now that the Supreme Court has defanged the Securities and Exchange Commission and all but immunized presidents from criminal prosecution for official acts, Trump would have little reason to divest or put his shares in a blind trust. Trump Media could win lucrative government contracts. Anyone looking to curry favor with Trump could buy advertising on Truth Social at inflated prices, effectively filtering cash to the company’s largest shareholder. Billionaires could buy up shares of DJT, boosting Trump’s net worth, at the same time they have business before the government — a merger they want to survive antitrust scrutiny, say, or a matter before the Federal Communications Commission. People seeking influence or favors — anyone from a rich guy who wants to be an ambassador to a criminal looking for a pardon — could buy stock to demonstrate their fealty. And in the realm of the stupid but plausible, what if the shitlords of r/wallstreetbets offer Trump a quid pro quo — they’ll pump his stock if he renames an aircraft carrier the USS Stonks? The possibilities are as unbounded as Trump’s capacity for self-interest.
Wes Moss (left) and Andy Dean Litinsky (far right) in season two of The Apprentice.
Photo: NBC
Taking Trump public may not have been possible without the rise of an obscure financial instrument, the special-purpose-acquisition company. In 2020, the pandemic stock market was surging, and the perception among entrepreneurs was that SPACs let private companies get in on the action quicker and with less oversight than the traditional way of going public, the IPO. Celebrities and athletes were looking to join the frenzy, from Shaquille O’Neal to Martha Stewart. Even if their business plans were fundamentally stupid, even if mom-and-pop investors would later lose nearly all their money, the people who got in on a SPAC at the beginning could make a pile.
That was the germ of Andy Litinsky’s idea in Atlanta in November 2020: Start a new company with Trump, invite the MAGA faithful to invest, and profit. He, Moss, and Wilkerson — a Los Angeles native whom he had worked with at a conservative radio show — brainstormed a Trump-focused media company. It would have a social-networking arm and a streaming-video service, plus a digital-infrastructure operation. They couldn’t take the idea directly to Trump while he was in office, so as they waited for his term to end, they pitched the Apprentice creator Mark Burnett and Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship. Both said “no.” (This account is based on public filings and court documents as well as interviews with investors and insiders at Trump’s company and campaign. Shannon Devine, a spokesperson for Trump Media, said, “This lazy, partisan hit job published by a leftwing mouthpiece is clearly false and defamatory, and New York Magazine will be held accountable. We’ll see you in court.”)
When Trump left the White House, the group approached a Florida lawyer named Bradford Cohen about getting them a meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Cohen had ties to Trump, including having helped Kodak Black and Lil Wayne in their efforts to secure presidential pardons. He’d also been on The Apprentice in 2004, when he led his team to victory by designing a toy for Mattel that would appeal to boys ages 6 to 8, only to be fired in the next episode for fumbling an ice-cream-sales contest.
In late January 2021, Cohen, Moss, and Litinsky met with Trump in Florida like walk-ons in the worst reality-TV reunion of all time. Trump seemed relieved to see some people whom he did not blame for losing him the election. Under the gilded chandeliers of Mar-a-Lago, after dining on cheeseburgers, Moss and Litinsky set up a whiteboard detailing their vision for a new company. The first bullet point emphasized that they required no investment cash from Trump, a detail that immediately piqued his interest. And the overall idea was familiar. Starting a right-wing media company had been Trump’s fallback plan in 2016, when it seemed likely he would lose to Hillary Clinton. That October, according to reports at the time, Trump dispatched his son-in-law Jared Kushner to engage the services of Aryeh Bourkoff, the boutique investment banker who is a fixture of media dealmaking.
Trump told the group to develop a strategic plan. Moss and Litinsky imagined a social network for conservatives tired of the posting restrictions at the big-tech platforms, and they dreamed up shows that could run on the streaming-video service. The possibilities included American Sumo, in which porcine wrestling novices would slam into each other; The Conways, a reality-TV show about Kellyanne, George, and their teenage daughter, Claudia; and Golfing With Tiger, about Tiger Woods and Donald Trump hitting the links together. Trump seemed interested. He’d been kicked off the major social-media sites after the insurrection at the Capitol and kept repeating to Moss and Litinsky, “I want my voice back.” Trump and his former TV apprentices worked out some loose deal points. In exchange for agreeing to post exclusively on the company’s social-networking arm, he’d get 90 percent of the shares; the other 10 percent would be split between Moss and Litinsky.
In early February 2021, the month that Trump’s second impeachment, for incitement of insurrection, ended in his acquittal in the Senate, Moss, Litinsky, and Cohen returned to Mar-a-Lago. Trump ended their meeting seeming noncommital, but he asked Cohen to stay behind. Forty-five minutes later, he called Litinsky to say he was interested, so long as Cohen got an ownership stake, too. Moss and Litinsky agreed, lowering their combined stake to 8.6 percent so that Cohen could have 1.4 percent.
The company needed a name. They liked Trump Media Group until they realized that the initials were already taken by, among others, Tiny Meat Gang, a podcast by two comedians with a cult following. On February 8, they incorporated instead as Trump Media & Technology Group.
Fraud, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, began almost immediately. Contrary to the popular idea that SPACs are a free-for-all, there are plenty of regulations that must be followed. In simplified form, the process involves two basic parties. One is a private company that wants to go public. The other is a shell company that is already trading on the stock market but has no operations — just a pile of cash that it can use to acquire a business. SPAC shells are often called “blank check” companies because their investors have given them a certain amount of money but have no idea yet who the check will be made out to. That’s one of the most obvious guidelines set by the government. SPACs can’t approach a target until after they’ve raised their capital.
After establishing Trump Media, the executives started cold-calling SPACs. It was rough going. One former Trump-administration official who picked up the phone thought he was being pranked. The head of a major financial firm loved the idea but then thought better of it, realizing that getting involved would risk a revolt from his thousands of employees.
The most promising person they reached was Patrick Orlando, a former Deutsche Bank derivatives trader who had started an investment firm called Benessere Capital. Orlando had recently raised $100 million for a SPAC, Benessere Capital Acquisition, and was looking for a private company to spend it on. Moss and Litinsky took Orlando to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. They brought along the conservative commentator Dan Bongino and Scott St. John, the former executive producer of Deal or No Deal, who would later work on Trump Media’s streaming-video plans. The meeting was intended to be a show of force, proving to Orlando that this was a serious venture, and proving to Trump — who was calling Moss and Litinsky at all hours to berate them for moving slowly and taking too many vacations — that the business was progressing.
As they waited for Trump, they ordered Diet Cokes, the boss’s drink of choice. Orlando asked for a shot of rum, even though Trump is a teetotaler and it was the middle of the afternoon. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow pitchman turned election denier, walked over to chat, mentioning that he couldn’t return to his native Minnesota out of fear that he was going to be served in the Dominion defamation lawsuit. When Trump arrived, he was dressed in golf attire and carrying a picture of himself with Jack Nicklaus, whom he’d just played with.
Trump started monologuing, talking about some of his favorite tweets, the nearly 90 million followers he’d lost, and how his phone’s autocorrect had once nearly changed “Melania” to “Melissa” before he caught it. Eventually, Trump turned to Bongino and asked what he thought about a Trump Media SPAC deal.
“Sir,” Bongino replied, “this is the greatest financial arbitrage of all time.”
A few weeks later, in April, Moss and Litinsky met again with Orlando to hash out further details. They emerged shell-shocked. During the meeting, Orlando had suggested that instead of using the Benessere SPAC, they use a newer one he had in the works called Digital World Acquisition Corporation. It had yet to IPO and could likely amass far more capital, increasing the amount they could profit. Moss and Litinsky, aware that SPACs are forbidden from seriously engaging with a potential target until they’ve raised money from investors, were worried about the legal implications. SPACs must genuinely search the marketplace for a company to buy; they can’t mislead the public about keeping an open mind. If Orlando switched SPACs and was already zeroed in on Trump Media, it would mean that many of their communications to that point could have run afoul of the law. The issue was so black-and-white that the executives began to wonder if Orlando was a secret government agent trying to ensnare them. As first reported by the Washington Post, they arranged a follow-up meeting with Orlando, which they recorded. Litinsky said, “We can only engage in discussions after they’re public. That’s the rule.” Orlando replied, according to the Post, “That’s exactly the rules we have to play by,” and added, “We have to be very smart. Obviously, we can talk hypothetically about if there were another vehicle — ” Then Litinsky broke in and kept him from saying more.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, Orlando had conversations with Trump Media about going public through Digital World. He also signed and submitted to the SEC a document stating the opposite: “We have not selected any specific business combination target and we have not, nor has anyone on our behalf, engaged in any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any business combination target with respect to an initial business combination with us.”
For Trump’s birthday in June, Orlando wrote a letter appealing to his ego. “I was unaware of the extent of your brilliance,” he wrote, according to the Post. “On your birthday, my only wish is that you realize how proud we are of your successes to date.” Moss and Litinsky persuaded him not to send it, in part because the sycophancy was over the top even by Trump standards and in part because they knew Trump hated the idea of getting older. Mar-a-Lago has a micro-economy in which such intel is sold to supplicants by people with proximity to Trump. The Truth Social executives paid $15,000 to Will Russell, a Trump bodyman, and $20,000 to Dan Scavino, Trump’s social-media director, who were in a position to find out things like his mood, when he’d be coming off the golf course, and when was the best time to call.
Moss, Litinsky, and Wilkerson traveled to Trump’s clubs with potential investors to show the former president that there was real money behind what they were doing and to give the investors the thrill of an audience with the former commander-in-chief. Trump didn’t disappoint, ordering everyone pigs in a blanket and crab cakes from a wait staff that was at his beck and call, asking the assembled millionaires if he should stop talking about how the 2020 election was stolen and telling them how he’d said to Xi Jinping that while he personally didn’t care what happened with Taiwan, if China did anything, it would be World War III, and how he’d warned the Taliban that if they harmed American troops, there would be serious consequences. “And they said, ‘Nuclear?’ ” Trump said in his best imitation of a frightened Afghan. Trump showed the rapt guests the glare he supposedly gave as he responded by saying, simply, “Nuclear.”
After reiterating to regulators and the public that Digital World had no intended target, Orlando took the shell company public in early September, raising almost $300 million. That meant talks with Trump Media about filling the shell were now legally permitted — though they were nearly derailed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., who were demanding stakes in the proposed venture even though they had not done any significant work. An internal record later modeled them getting 1.7 million shares each. (It didn’t come to pass, and the company says the two have not been compensated.) “They were coming in and asking for a handout,” Wilkerson, whose early role at the company conferred co-founder status, later told the Post. “They were taking equity away from hardworking individuals.” He also gave the newspaper the notes he, Moss, and Litinsky had been taking at the time. One said that a Trump-family associate had indicated Don Jr. “needs a bedtime story and some love.” Also: “President trump calls me in morning to yell at me because don jr is upset.” On October 12: “djt calls in crazy mood and he tries to renegotiate the entire deal … don jr walks in room and wants to get paid.” At one point, negotiations stalled while Don Jr. was unreachable during a pheasant hunt.
On October 20, 2021, Trump signed a contract at Mar-a-Lago: Digital World would acquire Trump Media. The shares leaped more than 350 percent on news of the impending tie-up. Litinsky was at a coffee shop when Trump phoned, elated. “How is our beautiful new company doing?” he asked. Then he started in on the real reason for his call: How would Litinsky feel about giving up some of his equity to Melania? Litinsky stammered something about how that would incur an enormous tax bill. Trump didn’t seem bothered and suggested there were ways around such things and that even if there weren’t, Litinsky should do it anyway.
SPACs and their acquisition targets have a set period of time to complete their mergers, but the government put the process on hold to investigate what already looked like securities fraud. Still operating as a private company, Trump Media came close to running out of money, burning through cash on lawyers, compliance, engineers, and rent. Soon, though, Orlando got in touch with miraculous news. He’d secured some stopgap funding, which would come from an entity called ES Family Trust. It was controlled by a Russian American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, whose uncle is a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Postolnikov sent the funds through a bank he co-owned that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.
The upshot was that even with the SPAC maneuver and its $300 million in limbo, there would be enough capital to build a social network. And the executives had decided on a name. At a meeting at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Moss and Litinsky pitched him on Virt, short for virtuous. Trump suggested Truth instead. They looked up the domain TruthSocial.com, saw that it was available for a little more than $2,000, and bought it. When they ran the name by Melania, she burst out laughing. “Truth?!” she said, pointing at her husband. “This guy?”
Very little about Trump Media signaled to investors that Truth Social would be a well-run business, and that included its new CEO. The board selected Devin Nunes, a right-wing California congressman who resigned his seat to take the job in December 2021. Nunes had never led a technology or media company. Rather, he was a close Trump ally who had received bipartisan criticism for his efforts to undermine the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election as well as widespread mockery for his tendency to sue his detractors for defamation. His legal targets included Esquire, CNN, the McClatchy newspaper chain, an anonymous Twitter user who pretended to be his mother, and another poster who pretended to be the congressman’s cow. Before leaving the White House, Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At Trump Media, Nunes’s annual salary was $750,000, and it later increased to $1 million.
Truth Social opened to the public in February 2022. The site was bare-bones, buggy, and difficult to sign up for. Trump himself could not be bothered to use the service, so one of the executives ghostwrote his inaugural post: “Get ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!”
Truth Social never really got off the ground as a business. In April, Reuters reported that two essential executives, the chief of technology and the chief of product development, had both quit, while downloads of the Truth Social app declined to 60,000 per week and just 1.2 million in total. Recruiting should have been easy in Atlanta, which was a hub for anti-woke engineers, but Nunes seemed worried that Stacey Abrams, then making her second run for Georgia governor, would organize protests outside its office, and he began planning to move the business to Sarasota, Florida.
In May, the company filed a prospectus with the government, laying out its business plan. The section on risk factors ran to some 32,000 words and cited ten material risks posed by Trump himself. Fox Business reported that the company fell behind by $1.6 million in payments to RightForge, its digital-infrastructure provider. The company also discovered that “Truth Social” was too common to be trademarked. A handful of right-wing politicians and influencers, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Charlie Kirk, were posting to the social network, but it was also becoming a hive for QAnon-style conspiracies. The gunman who was killed storming an FBI office in Ohio that summer was discovered to have mentioned his plans for the attack on the site. Moss and Litinsky resigned from the board, and on LinkedIn they removed all references to Truth Social. In August, Wilkerson sought whistleblower protection, hired lawyers from Cranfill Sumner, and turned over an enormous volume of company records to the SEC. He went on to work at a Starbucks in suburban North Carolina.
All of this occurred while the SPAC deal was frozen, pending government review of its potentially fraudulent origins. Digital World resolved the probe in July 2023 by agreeing to pay an $18 million fine. Two brothers who got in on the deal, Michael and Gerald Shvartsman, eventually pleaded guilty to insider trading, and a third investor, Bruce Garelick, was convicted of securities fraud. (Postolnikov, who made $22 million, was investigated but never charged.) For all of 2023, Trump Media had revenue of $4.1 million and a loss of $58.2 million. On Wall Street, the company was somewhere between a joke and an afterthought. As the idiosyncratic voice of the industry, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, put it in a column, “Everyone kind of forgot about it?”
The first sign that there was a latent, untapped power to the stock came early this year. Trump’s victory in Iowa and DeSantis’s exit from the race made Trump Media shares nearly triple. With the SEC’s blessing, investors signed off on the SPAC at long last in March, clearing the way for the $300 million that Digital World had raised way back in 2021 to finally flow to Trump Media. But that was of little concern to Trump himself. After some dilution, he had a majority stake in the combined venture, and when his initials replaced Digital World’s trading symbol on NASDAQ, the stock hit a new high for the year. By the next day, his personal share was worth $5 billion.
When Trump entered the White House in 2017 with his business interests intact — he was able to profit as a real-estate developer, club owner, hotelier, and entertainment personality — ethics watchdogs faced all kinds of novel problems. The Constitution forbids the president from accepting emoluments from foreign or domestic sources. Yet during Trump’s term, the Chinese government spent more than $5 million on his hotels. When T-Mobile was attempting to merge with Sprint, company executives not only made sure to stay at the Trump International in Washington, they posted photos of their choice on Instagram. The Secret Service spent nearly $2 million at Trump properties. Vice-President Mike Pence stayed at one of his boss’s golf resorts on a trip to Ireland, even though it was nearly 200 miles from the event he was there to attend. Two emoluments lawsuits against Trump reached the Supreme Court. All of these avenues for enriching the chief executive pale next to the possibility of a president sitting atop a publicly traded company, especially one with such a shabby underlying business.
“We saw a little of this in his first term with the Trump hotel and Mar-a-Lago, but the potential here is just on another level,” says Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School who wrote a book on corruption in American politics. “For a hotel, there are only so many rooms. If you book it for an event, you have to hold the event. Here, there is no limit to what foreign governments, corporations, or shady actors can do. The design of it makes the funneling of money into Trump’s pocket much more direct.”
“The whole company is just an alter ego for Trump,” says Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It is not a company that has particularly strong fundamentals, and so the only reason a foreign government or a wealthy person or a candidate for office would invest is to curry favor with Trump. We are looking at what may be the most brazen pay-to-play in our nation’s history.”
In March, Trump announced a surprising policy reversal. As president, he’d tried to ban TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company; now, abruptly, he was for the social network’s continued operation. The about-face followed a meeting Trump took with Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor who owns a significant stake in TikTok’s parent. When reporters dug up the fact that his trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, had until recently been the single-largest institutional shareholder in Digital World, there was outrage: Here was a seemingly perfect example of a billionaire using Trump’s company to influence him. Susquehanna has since insisted that its 2 percent stake was offset by equivalent short positions and that it had “zero economic interest in Trump Media.” Even if that were true, taking multibillion-dollar investment firms at their word is hardly a model for good government. Was Trump’s flip-flop influenced by Susquehanna’s trading activity? “That is exactly the point,” says Blair Levin, a former lawyer with the Federal Communications Commission. “We can’t know.”
Trump Media has borrowed money to fund its operations, and in October 2022, Reuters reported the names of some of the lenders. They include Karl Pfluger, a Texas energy executive whose brother is a Republican congressman; Kenny Troutt, a billionaire Republican donor; George Glass, who was Trump’s ambassador to Portugal; and other Trump supporters. All stand to gain from being in Trump’s good graces during a second term. Says Ritter, the economics professor, “A lot of investors just see this as a way to give almost a charitable contribution to Donald Trump, maybe in the hopes that as president he will favor them in some way or another.”
Trump Media remains as dysfunctional as ever. The SEC recently sued Orlando, accusing him of securities fraud. Nunes is raging against short sellers; he wrote a letter to NASDAQ complaining about four large firms betting against the stock, leading Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities to publicly call him a “proverbial loser” and “exactly the type of person Donald Trump would have fired on The Apprentice.” And Litinsky and Moss are fighting to keep their stake in Trump Media. Earlier this year, they sued the company, claiming they were being deprived of the full value of their shares — several hundred million dollars. They then sued again, claiming that the company was trying to prevent them from selling those shares. In between those lawsuits, Trump Media countersued, claiming that Moss and Litinsky should forfeit their stake because they “failed spectacularly at every turn.” It brought to mind a certain faux ad campaign for jeans, except this time, everyone’s ass was showing.
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