Not a ton of winning to report here: A new SEC filing shows that Donald Trump‘s Truth Social lost some $73 million in net sales in its first 16 months.
In a sprawling, 530-page filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (see it here), the social media platform championed by the former president lost $50 million on $1.4 million in net sales in calendar 2022, after launching in February of that year. The losses narrowed some for the first half of 2023, with the platform down $23 million from January-to-June, which extrapolates to $46 million for the full year.
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.