Many years ago when we worked in Hollywood, a friend of ours once did a joking impression of a movie producer trying to spin a film bombing harder than Dresden in 1945 into a success: “Sure that movie lost a hundred million dollars. But it made twenty-five million dollars.”
We found ourselves remembering that joke when we watched former congressman and current CEO of Donald Trump’s Latest Rube-Running Scam Truth Social, Devin “Moo-nes” Nunes, try to spin Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo into believing that the company’s IPO two weeks ago was a tremendous success despite the stock immediately cratering like a Ukrainian wheat field.
We don’t think Bartiromo bought it. Do you know how unbelievable you have to sound about Trump for even Maria Bartiromo to sound unconvinced?
Bartiromo started by saying she had read the company’s latest SEC filing, which showed Truth Social bringing in a whopping $4 million in revenue in 2023, and also noted that the company’s value has fallen by 50 percent since it went public two weeks ago. She then asked Nunes when the company would turn profitable.
Nunes responded:
“It’s important to remember those numbers are based on what was the longest IPO in history, so we were overregulated. So if you actually look at the cost, we built Truth Social … for a fraction of what many of these big tech dinosaur companies were built for.”
Silly regulators, not letting Trump and his minions just get away with what was clearly a pump-and-dump stock scheme. Also, the underlying technology of Truth Social is basically just a rip-off of better-built and more innovative social media platforms. Because to Trump, nothing is worth actually doing if you can do it on the cheap or even outright steal it instead.
Honestly, that Trump Tower is not built entirely out of cardboard is perhaps the most surprising fact about it.
Truth Social is such a scam that Barry Diller last week said anyone who has invested in it is a dope.
Nunes then bragged that the platform “communicates to millions of people,” by which he means one million a month, a number that makes end-stage Friendster look robust. Also that Truth Social has $200 million in cash in the bank. Funny, we remember just a week ago when the company claimed it had come out of the IPO with $300 million in the bank. Quick, someone see if any of Trump’s lawyers have seen $100 million worth of bills finally get paid off since last Tuesday.
Nunes also claimed the company has zero debt, which, come on, it’s a company with the Trump name on it. If it isn’t larded up with debt now, just give them until Wednesday.
“We’re looking at the entire ecosystem. What does it take to protect people in the United States and around the world from these tyrants of Big Tech who want to silence them?”
There is a lot of this sort of yammer about tyrants and ecosystems and building out streaming video and putting out family-friendly content and something about Truth Social being “the only game in town” that can cater to conservatives with such items. Which is not true, but if Nunes wants to pretend he has reinvented Rumble, that’s his problem.
Nunes also bragged about the company having 400,000 retail shareholders and adding to that number in recent days:
“Now guess what’s happened over the last couple of weeks? We think we’ve added over 200,000 new retail investors.”
Well sure, short sellers know a good bet when they see one.
“Now we’re doing something that no one’s done, and that is, how do you give a home to canceled channels? To canceled documentaries? How do you put streaming into our app?”
Yes, where can “canceled” documentaries go to be shown, besides wherever the fuck they want? For crying out loud, Elon Musk has made hosting streaming content allegedly canceled by woke Marxists or whatever a personal mission.
Toward the end, Nunes pitches Truth Social as a replacement for people who want to “cut the cord,” although we’re willing to bet they will not be pitching CNN to stream on their platform anytime ever.
He also manages to refer to Donald Trump as “one of the most iconic brands in the last hundred years,” which is true in the same way that the Mafia is also an iconic brand.
In what we’re sure is a total coincidence, the first trading session after the Nunes interview saw Truth Social’s stock drop another 10 percent almost immediately after the opening bell rang. That means the value of Trump’s own stake has fallen by nearly half, or $2 billion, in two weeks.
Even for Donald Trump, that’s an impressive amount of money-losing.
Yr Wonkette recommends not sending Nunes back out there to talk up the company. As with everything from his congressional career, particularly the Russia investigation, he is not even remotely close to helping.
[YouTube]
You could buy put options on TruthSocial, but maybe you’d rather help Wonkette keep going?