Achi news desk-
Unless you are a die-hard Donald Trump supporter, right-wing influencer, Republican member of Congress, or the former president himself, you probably haven’t spent much time in the digital wasteland that is Truth Social.
Founded in 2022 as Trump’s personal social media platform, Truth Social was created as a MAGA alternative to X (then Twitter) following the former president’s ban from the platform following the January 6 Capitol riot.
Truth Social has appeared on the brink of financial collapse since its launch. His meager base of 5 million monthly active users functions primarily as a beehive around his queen bee: Trump. The former president uses the platform as his unique social media forum for stream-conscious rants, screeching against his political enemies, endorsement announcements, and sharing articles extolling his greatness.
Despite internal chaos, federal investigations, and the many legal and criminal issues faced by its majority shareholders, Truth Social made its stock market debut late last month. It’s been a rocky few weeks since the IPO, with abysmal financial reports rocking investor confidence and Trump suing two of the platform’s co-founders.
Trump took to the platform on Thursday to try to reassure everyone. “I think TRUTH is AWESOME!” he wrote in a multi-post rant pumping up the platform. “First of all, it’s very solid, with over $200,000,000 in CASH and ZERO DEBT. More importantly, it’s the main way to get the word out and, for better or worse, people want to hear what I have to say, perhaps, according to experts, more than anyone else in the World. “
To understand what’s going on with Truth Social, here’s a timeline of the platform’s dramatic, lawsuit-filled spiral.
January 8, 2021: Trump has been banned from his favorite social media platform, Twitter.
May 2021: Trump unveils “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” a website to post his ramblings in a vague social media format. The project survives less than a month before being shut down.
21 October 2021: Trump announces the creation of the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), and his plans to create a social media app to compete with Twitter. Trump adds that the company was created by merging a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC). A SPAC is a publicly traded shell company that exists to raise money for a merger with another company that is trying to go public on the stock market. SPACs are limited to a two-year period before they must either complete the proposed merger or dissolve.
21 October 2021: Hackers almost immediately find Truth Social’s unpublicized beta domain and begin trolling the platform.
November 6, 2021: The New York Times reports that DWAC’s massive $300 million investment for the venture may have violated securities laws by raising money from its proposed merger with Truth Social before it was officially listed on the stock market. Throughout the fall and winter of 2021, a series of reports are emerging on the ethical questions surrounding Trump’s financial supporters, and their history of being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
December 6, 2021: The DWAC filing reveals that the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have begun investigating the SPAC’s communications with TMTG, noting that both agencies may suspect improper financial transactions between the companies.
December 21, 2021: The Washington Post reports that Arc Capital, a Chinese investment firm involved in the creation of Digital World Acquisition Corp., has been the target of multiple investigations by federal securities regulators. The company allegedly misrepresented shell companies as thriving operations enterprises.
February 21, 2022: Truth Social is going live.
March 30, 2022: After gathering more than 800,000 users in its first week, new user registrations drop to around 60,000 per month after launch. Overall website traffic drops by 93 percent in the same period.
April 4, 2022: Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, Truth Social’s head of technology and head of product development, are leaving the company after less than a year. They cite software problems, poor user growth, and general company dysfunction.
June 8, 2022: Trump, along with five others, is leaving the TMTG board ahead of a series of subpoenas issued by the SEC and a Manhattan grand jury. The news is kept quiet until it is made public by a Sarasota Herald-Tribune report in July.
June 27, 2022: A Manhattan grand jury issues subpoenas to the entire DWAC board.
July 1, 2022: TMTG is receiving subpoenas from the SEC and a Manhattan grand jury for documents related to its proposed merger with DWAC.
August 30, 2022: Google says Truth Social’s content moderation policies do not meet its standards to be available on the Google Play store. Truth Social will be added to the Google Play store in October after implementing stronger content moderation policies.
November 3, 2022: DWAC is delaying a vote to move forward with completing its merger with TMTG for the sixth time, after failing to garner the 65 percent shareholder support necessary to complete the deal.
November 19, 2022: After he bought Twitter, Elon Musk restores Trump’s account to the platform. The next day, the former president explained that he had no intention of returning to Twitter, and that Truth Social would continue to be his main social media platform.
March 15, 2023: The guardian reports that federal investigators in New York are looking into whether TMTG violated anti-money laundering laws after receiving $8 million in funding linked to a Russian oligarch.
July 20, 2023: The SEC announces that it has settled fraud charges against DWAC “for making material misrepresentations in forms filed with the SEC as part of DWAC’s initial public offering and proposed merger with Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.” The SEC found that “DWAC misled investors and the SEC by failing to disclose that it had formulated a plan to acquire and was pursuing the acquisition of TMTG prior to DWAC’s IPO.” DWAC agrees to pay an $18 million penalty upon closing of merger transaction.
September 5, 2023: DWAC shareholders vote to extend the merger deadline by a year, days before it was due to expire.
October 13, 2023: DWAC reveals that it has received $467 million worth of termination notices from investors, and that it would repay an additional $533 million – almost all of its $1 billion fundraising collection.
November 13, 2023: Digital World Acquisition Corp. reveals that Truth Social brought in only $1.4 million in net sales in 2022, and lost $50 million. In the first six months of 2023, the company made $2.3 million, but lost $23 million.
February 16, 2024: Trump is ordered to pay $355 million in penalties as a result of a civil fraud lawsuit brought against him by the state of New York, this on top of the huge pile of legal bills already caused by his various court cases.
February 27, 2024: TMTG and DWAC are suing former DWAC CEO Patrick Orlando and its largest investor, Arc Capital, alleging that Orlando planned to stop the merger in order to “get an extortion windfall.”
February 28, 2024: Two of TMTG’s co-founders, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, are filing a lawsuit alleging that Trump and others conspired to dilute their shares of the company ahead of its expected merger with DWAC and its stock market debut.
The Washington Post notes that the lawsuit alleges that in 2022 Trump tried to pressure Litinsky to give his shares to his wife, Melania, and then tried to remove Litinsky from the company when she refused.
February 29, 2024: Arc Capital is filing a lawsuit of its own, alleging that DWAC executives tried to strip the company of 2 million shares of the company.
March 19, 2024: DWAC is suing one of its former executives, Patrick Orlando, in an attempt to force him to vote in favor of the merger with TMTG.
March 22, 2024: DWAC officially approves its merger with TMTG, marking its stock market debut.
March 26, 2024: TMTG is going public under the ticker code DJT, closing the day at a valuation of nearly $8 billion. While Trump is banned from trading his shares for six months, the stock valuation means Trump could end up securing a $3 billion financial bailout.
April 1, 2024: A series of FEC filings reveal that Truth Social reported losses of $58 million in 2023, against just $4.8 million in revenue. DJT’s stock valuation plummets as a result.
April 2, 2024: Bloomberg reports that Trump has sued Truth Social co-founders Litinsky and Moss in an attempt to absorb their stake in the company. The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24, alleges that Litinsky and Moss made “a series of reckless and wasteful decisions at a critical time” that caused “significant damage” to the company and a “decline in prices stock was merged.”
Litinsky and Moss were to net 8.6 million shares of the new company. The lawsuit is trying to take everything away from them.
April 3, 2024: Michael Shvartsman and Gerald Shvartsman, two early investors in Truth Social, pleaded guilty to participating in an insider trading scheme that netted them more than $22 million before DWAC merged with TMTG.
April 3, 2024: The guardian reports that Truth Social, in 2022, was bailed out of potential bankruptcy through emergency loans provided by Anton Postolnikov, a Russian-American businessman. Postolnikov has been the subject of interest for years in a joint investigation between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into allegations of insider trading and money laundering related to the DWA/TMTG merger.
April 4, 2024: Trump is trying to inspire confidence in DJT with a series of Truth Social posts. The company’s stock continues to fall.
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