Truth Social reports $73M net loss since launch
reuters.com
reuters.com
Edit: Attempt to answer unsarcastically (last 3 months):
Regulatory settlement: $10,000,000
Legal investigations expense: $388,652
Franchise tax expense: $50,000
So the majority of their losses are (one time?) legal expenses.
Whoah. For 6 months ended June 30, "Legal investigations expense" is $11M.
Is Truth Social basically paying Trump's ongoing legal costs?
Would that surprise anyone, Truth users included?
I get to thinking, “who is stupid enough to be doing this?” And admittedly without any evidence, I then wonder if this is what “being funded by foreign interests” looks like.
We know about the $100 billion dollar Saudi arms deal that Kushner inserted himself in after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. We know he personally backed Saudi Arabi in their conflict with Qatar. We know Kushner failed to disclose he owed around a billion dollars on failed investments in real estate.
Now after Kushner leaves government, MBS overrode his advisors to hand over $2 billion of state investment to Kushner's newly established fund.
What happened there?
Nixon and Kissigner went behind the back of the sitting president to torpedo his peace talks with North Vietnam. Basically they commited high treason (secretly conferring with the enemy) and Nixon admitted as much. Decades later Kissinger is still considered a role model of a diplomat in some circles.
That example was picked so as not to kick off a political discussion. I'm
2. But that doesn't mean "X is a foreign Y" isn't still significant or also wrong.
3. And just for the record, I'm actually a Disenfranchised American without the right to vote, aka. Canadian.
Honestly, why wouldn't he be?
I think the mistake you're making is presuming that a role model of a diplomat is determined by your notion of morality. The definition of "diplomacy" is "spoken or written communication by representatives of states (such as leaders and diplomats) intended to influence events in the international system", and the job description of a diplomat is "a person appointed by a state or an intergovernmental institution (...) to conduct diplomacy."
Knowing this, and knowing a bit of Kissinger's legacy, it's hard to disagree that he's one of the most successful and influential diplomats in history. He's been directly involved in all the critical events that determined the course of humanity during the 20th century, and he personally influenced or determined their outcome.
You might argue over your views on morality and Kissinger's legacy, but it is not possible to reject the fact that Kissinger is perhaps the top diplomat of the 20th century.
Other than that I fully appreciate that morality has no place in international relations.
Would it be possible for Truth Social to be just a very public money laundering front?
Especially now that he's unbanned from Twitter, where he has a significantly larger audience...but continues to post on TS where he is more or less the only thing keeping it active at all.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/spac-returns-remaining...
But yeah, seriously, it's a _Trump_ company. Where do you _think_ the money is going?
Listen, you add a bunch of employees, some of them executives and a nice office with a caffeteria and you get easily over this number.
I think what people get wrong is what is profit for Truth Social. People who own and operate it do not think about profit as the money they get from the platform directly or through advertising, the profit is in having an alternative social circle where they can gather their follower base and reach them without being impeded by "censorship" from a platform like Twitter (sorry, X is just a ridiculous name).
In times past billionaires would keep their own newspapers even if unprofitable on paper just because they could create their own spin on the current events. That ability to control the narrative can be worth more than the cost of propping up a failing enterprise.
If you understand this, you might find that this thing actually is quite profitable.
But I wonder who's paying for it. As a political campaign that seems within normal American amounts of spending.
I get the impression that most people on the platform, the silent majority, are not fans. It's the Howard Stern effect. People who hated him tuned into his show more than any actual fans.
Of course these days he’s turned more or less into Imus.
It was a SPAC. Shock of all shocks the company is dodgy.
Can this meme die already? Uber turned $25b into a $107b company. Rides/Mobility are profitable.
> Rides/Mobility are profitable.
You can probably pick out a random subset of any company that is profitable. The sales team in nearly any company is profitable. The question is how the profitable part would do if disassociated from the all the loss making parts.
Probably pretty well considering it's profitable. Good thing one of Trump's favorite things is to go bankrupt in which you can indeed separate the loss making parts from the profitable parts. Although obviously not great for local labors when their invoices are to the loss making part.
They'll be left with a highly profitable business with no moat, no capital and no employees that work on profitable activities. The odds are really good that in this case that sort of thinking will fail the acid test. They'd be a taxi company without the licenses - that isn't worth a decade of billion dollar losses.
Shows current quarter profitability
Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust - both connected to Anton Postolnikov, Aleksandr Smirnov (Smirnov worked for the Russian government until 2017)
ARC Capital (Shanghai-based firm with China connections) helped too set up the SPAC.
Orginal investgors Karl Pfluger (Oryx Midstream) Patrick Walsh (CEO of Empire Holdings) Kenny Troutt (Texas telecoms billionaire) Roy Bailey, George Glass, Bob McNutt,
> In 2022, Truth Social posted a loss of $50 million, with net sales of just $1.4 million. It lost $23 million in the first half of this year, with net sales of $2.3 million.
Does anyone have any insight on whether spending over $23 million to keep a social network afloat for six months is a reasonable operational cost? It seems a bit too pricey for the kind of operation it seems to be.
But that still feels way off what they spend.
For CDN they're using cloudflare, probably on enterprise pricing which would save them lots of money on image transfer.
To be clear, this is only looking at the costs of running the platform itself. I don't know if they have a moderation team or spend lots on advertising.
And I don't imagine he hires based on actual competence either.
The big question to me would be what the activity and user trajectory is, and what's stopping both that and their sales from increasing faster. If their user acquisition cost is so high that they're not able to build an attractive audience fast enough to see a sharper increase in revenue than this, they have a serious problem (and a real reason to worry that their cost of acquiring users will be higher than their customers lifetime value)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
>A rat king is a collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and bound together in some way. This could be a result of an entangling material like hair, a sticky substance such as sap or gum, or the tails being tied together.
>A similar phenomenon with squirrels has been observed, which has had modern documented examples.
>Etymology
>The original German term, Rattenkönig, was calqued into English as rat king, and into French as roi des rats. The term was not originally used in reference to actual rats, but for persons who lived off others. Conrad Gesner in Historia animalium (1551–58) stated: "Some would have it that the rat waxes mighty in its old age and is fed by its young: this is called the rat king." Martin Luther stated: "finally, there is the Pope, the king of rats right at the top." Later, the term referred to a king sitting on a throne of knotted tails.[1]
>An alternative theory states that the name in French was rouet de rats (or a spinning wheel of rats, the knotted tails being wheel spokes), with the term transforming over time into roi des rats,[1] because formerly French oi was pronounced [we] or similar; nowadays it is pronounced [wa].
73,000/240 ≈ 300.
Probably not, right
edit: it seems there is 607,000 monthly users on Truth Social, Mastodon.social has 270,000 monthly users according to their own website. So Truth Social wins. But I am not sure how are Truth Social numbers accurate
https://masknetwork.medium.com/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-n...
What forms of revenue generation does Truth Social have?
> In January 2023, the New York Times reported that, while Truth Social now carried advertising, it was limited to niche products, without the participation of major brands.
It's not surprising that they're barely making any money if the only people willing to advertise on the platform are hardcore Trump supporters.
There's no clear information on how many active users are on the platform. If Trump really wants to keep this service alive he can probably sell a subscription similar to the Blue Checkmark. Although it's possible that this would cannibalize part of his political donations.
A few months back I found out that discoverability of Truth Social is also very poor. After hearing about some post I tried searching for it on DuckDuckGo and found out that they don't index the site at all. All the results were for news articles talking about the service.
To me, the value of having a social media presence would be to boost your message beyond its core audience. However, Truth Social seems like it has a very selective group of people that would even sign up, so there's less of a chance of your posts being seen by someone who wasn't already interested in them.
I'd imagine it'd be a lot cheaper to host too, and could probably still get around the same amount spent on advertising.
What was the point of a Klan rally?
It's a veneer of legitimacy for an ideology that relies not on factualness but bravado...
Politicos didn't care because their posts were getting engagement, and spreading across the network. With Trump, there's no equivalent of that because it began life as politics platform and its audience reflects that; you'll see Trump messages whether you want to or not. That was not the case for Twitter.
Granted, TS was started when he was banned on Twitter but now? He could both save money and have more reach by shutting the whole thing down and going back to Twitter.
$73M is nothing next to the potential gains. Bloomberg spent much more that that and had nothing to show for it.
Totally. I don't know why Trump didn't come back though, maybe doesn't want to put himself again on a platform he can't control?
Bluesky is an interesting exception as so far there is only one server (bsky.app). According to Similarweb, bsky.app has 5 times more users than truthsocial.com
Sources cited: bong
That's such a great term, definitely stealing this one.
Specifically the quarterly one here mentioned: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/0001...
Should we take any figures from such as source as gospel?
They are effectively warning that the company may not be a going concern for much longer.