Truth Social: It's Complicated

I don't know what is going on with the Trumpets' direct entry into the social media market, Truth Social.

The project does seem to have done the country some good in that it gave Rep. Nunes a new hobby, probably a more harmless one than were his efforts at lawmaking.

Other than this, it is confusing, especially since it has gotten mixed up with SPACs, a yesteryear trend not yet old enough to be a cool retro thing.

A SPAC is a "special purpose acquisition company." It is a shell of a company, listed on a stock exchange, but with no operations other than the search for another company to buy.

Who would want to be purchased by a SPAC? Generally, a company that wants to be on a stock exchange but does not want the operational difficulties and the costs associated with, first, applying for a listing then, if that application is granted, staging an IPO. Getting yourself taken over by a SPAC that has already done the prep work and gotten listed evades that stuff. SPACs are also known as "blank check" company, because their investors effectively paid into a management that has no operational company to run, just the project of finding one.

This was a hot thing in 2020. As a fad it did not survive 2021. But there are still a few blank check companies around looking for acquisition targets, and Trump's company has made a deal with one of them. The operational company is the Trump Media & Technology Group (which owns Truth Social, just as Alphabet owns Google and Meta owns Facebook). The interested SPAC, also known as a blank check company, is called Digital World.

Yet the deal has run into some trouble. This gets confusing. I'll refer you to a story in The Wall Street Journal: SPAC Again Delays Shareholder Vote on Merger With Trump’s Social-Media Platform - WSJ

this summer, Alphabet said that it was not going to allow Truth Social on its Google Play platform due to its corporate policies about physical threats and incitements. But earlier this month it reversed that ruling, a decision that led to a spike in the value of Digital world's stock.

From a broader perspective the stock price (NASDAQ: DWAC) reveals continued skepticism about whether this deal will close. DWAC was worth in the neighborhoods of $44 - $45 a share in the late spring of this year, amid optimism not only that the deal would go forward but that the property was going to be a valuable one. Over the summer that price fell, and by the fall equinox it was $17 - $18 dollars.

The Google spike I mentioned brought it up only as far as $18.30. It has since given that back, and as I write these words it is below $17.

Part of the problem is that in order to believe that Truth Social is a valuable property one must believe that Trump's heart is in it and is going to stay in it. If, say, Elon Musk takes over twitter and asks him back, will Trump say "no, thanks, Elon, I'm committed to Truth Social now?" Will he devote equal attention both to tweeting and to truthing (or whatever it's called)? I'll leave that open.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog