Donald Trump’s Truth Social Has Millions In Financial Losses, SEC Filing Shows – Update
Editor’s note: This article previously reported a $73 million loss. That is incorrect. Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, had a loss of $31.6 million since its inception in 2021. According to a filing with the SEC, TMTG had a $50 million profit in 2022, not a loss of $50 million. We sincerely regret the errors and have corrected them in this story.
In advance of a proposed merger, Digital World Acquisition Corp. revealed in an SEC filing that TMTG has lost millions since its launch.
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A sprawling, 530-page filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (see it here) shows that while the conservative social media platform made $50 million in 2022, it has had total losses adding up to $31.6 million since its inception in 2021.
Trump revealed Truth Social in October 2021 — nine months after he was banned from Twitter in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was launched via a merger of a then-newly formed company called Trump Media and Technology Corp. with a Miami-based special purpose acquisition company, Digital World Acquisition Corp. SPACs are set up for the sole purpose of merging with another entity for an initial public offering.
The SEC began investigating Truth Social’s SPAC deal in December 2021, just as former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) quit Congress to become CEO of TMTG. Digital World Acquisition Corp revealed in a filing at the time that it had received a request for documents relating to “meetings of DWAC’s Board of Directors, policies and procedures relating to trading, the identification of banking, telephone and email addresses, the identities of certain investors, and certain documents and communications between DWAC and TMTG,” chaired by Trump.
Its launch announcement said Truth Social’s mission is to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.” The news release also claimed that the platform intended to launch a subscription video on demand service, TMTG+, that would feature “non-woke” entertainment programming. That has failed to materialize thus far.
Truth Social was announced about a year after the launch of Parler, a social networking platformed initially supported by Trump and other conservatives who saw red over heightened scrutiny of Facebook and Twitter posts during the 2020 election season. Parler was suspended from Apple’s app store days after the Capitol siege and later removed from Amazon Web Services and “every vendor,” its CEO John Matze said. Kanye West flirted with acquiring the platform a year ago but ultimately did not.
Our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter first reported on the Truth Social SEC filing today.
Dominic Patten contributed to this report.
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