Nine months after being kicked off social media for his role in inciting the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was launching a new media company with its own platform of social media.
Trump says his goal in launching the Trump Media & Technology Group and its “Truth Social” app is to create a rival for the big tech companies that have shut him out and denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his national rise.
“We live in a world where the Taliban has a strong presence on Twitter, but your favorite American president has been silenced,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
Conservative voices do well on traditional social media. On Wednesday, half of Facebook’s top 10 link posts came from conservative media, commentators or politicians, according to a daily list compiled by a New York Times technology columnist and internet studies professor using Facebook’s own data.
Trump has talked about starting his own social media site since being banned from Twitter and Facebook. An earlier effort to launch a blog on its existing website was scrapped after the page attracted dismal views.
TMTG did not aim low. In addition to the Truth Social app, which is slated to launch next month with a nationwide rollout early next year, the company says it is planning a video-on-demand service dubbed TMTG+ that will feature entertainment programs , news and podcasts.
A slide from a TMTG presentation on its website includes a chart of potential TMTG competitors, which range from Facebook and Twitter to Netflix and Disney+ to CNN. The same slide suggests that in the long term, TMTG will also become a powerhouse in cloud computing and payments and suggests that it will go hand in hand with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Stripe.
TMTG is also taking a few hits on Trump’s former favorite social network. The slides accompanying the listing of Truth Social pre-orders in Apple’s App Store depict a social network that bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, right down to the short messages and user IDs preceded by “@” signs.
The same graphics also feature a user named Jack’s Beard, who, in one image, fumes when an employee pushes back on an order to remove a user and their posts, calling it “a little over the top”. The Jack’s Beard account uses the handle @jack, which is Jack Dorsey’s handle on the real Twitter; Dorsey’s long shaggy beard has also caught the eye during his congressional appearances on Zoom.
Truth Social’s terms of service, meanwhile, prohibit users from annoying site employees and making statements that “disparage, tarnish, or harm, in our opinion, us and/or the site.” It was not immediately clear who the “we” refers to in this statement.
In a statement, the new company said it was created through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., and said it was seeking to become a publicly traded company.
Miami-based DWA is a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC. These publicly traded companies are designed to list the shares of a private company faster than a traditional initial public offering. In practice, this means that SPAC acquires a private company and then changes its name and other details to those of the acquired company.
SPACs pay for their acquisitions with cash provided by investors who participated in the SPAC IPO. DWA’s IPO on Sept. 8 raised $287.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
DWA said it raised approximately $293 million in cash, which it will use to expand TMTG’s businesses. The company’s major shareholders include several institutional investors, including Lighthouse Investment Partners, DE Shaw & Co. and Radcliffe Capital Management, according to an SEC filing. DWA said more details of the deal will be disclosed in future documents.
The deal has an initial enterprise value, a measure that takes into account a company’s total debts and assets, of $875 million, according to the statement. It still requires approval from DWA and TMTG shareholders, as well as regulators.
Shares of Digital World Acquisition soared 94% to $19.32 in morning trading.
