Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of struggling social media platform Truth Social, is began its long-delayed journey as a public company at Tuesday’s opening bell under the ticker symbol “DJT.”
The stock surged about 56% at the open, to $78, and trading was briefly halted for volatility. Trump Media shares have since stabilized at around $70, marking a 40% increase from Monday’s close.
Wall Street is assigning Trump Media an eye-popping valuation of around $13 billion — a price tag that experts warn is untethered to reality.
The skyrocketing share price comes despite the fact that Trump Media is burning through cash; piling up losses; and its main product, Truth Social, is losing users.
“This is a very unusual situation. The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, who has been studying initial public offerings (IPOs) for over 40 years.
Originally it was just a modified Mastodon instance with federation removed. They hired Alex Gleason who maintains a fork of Pleroma called “Soapbox” to make significant changes to the front and back ends of the site.
Gleason also runs a handful of federated Soapbox instances, all of which are dedicated to far-right “free speech” content, mostly Nazism (Poast) and Trans-hate (Spinster). He also helps admin many other instances dedicated to hate speech.
Gleason has indicated that Truth Social and Poast run on basically the same codebase.
Quite disturbing to see the microblogging equivalent of The Daily Stormer with a multibillion dollar market cap on the stock market…
To be fair, the code is not the content.
He was their technical director and the site is absolutely covered with Nazis. Find me a Soapbox instance that isn’t.
One of the key features of Soapbox (outside of Truth Social) is that you can still see and boost content from other instances that have blocked yours. Gleason even created workarounds to defeat authorized fetch.
This is so that they can engage in Kiwifarms-style harassment.
I would absolutely say that the malice is written into the code itself.