Category: Business

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Business Donald Trump Social Media

Trump’s Social Media Site Is On The Verge Of Financial Collapse

Less than two years since it was founded and went into operation, Donald Trump’s social mediate site, Truth Social, is unable to pay its bills and on the verge of financial collapse.

The Washington Post reports that Truth Social has no reliable source of income, which is likely to doom it:

Six months after its high-profile launch, the site — a clone of Twitter, which banned Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 — still has no guaranteed source of revenue and a questionable path to growth, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Digital World Acquisition, the company planning to take Trump’s start-up, the Trump Media & Technology Group, public.

The company warned this week that its business could be damaged if Trump “becomes less popular or there are further controversies that damage his credibility.” The company has seen its stock price plunge nearly 75 percent since its March peak and reported in a filing last week that it had lost $6.5 million in the first half of the year.

How bad are things at Truth Social? The site is on the verge of lacking a hosting service, which would render it unable to appear on the web:

There are signs that the company’s financial base has begun to erode. The Trump company stopped paying RightForge, a conservative web-hosting service, in March and now owes it more than $1 million, according to Fox Business, which first reported the dispute.

The company has also been unable to trademark its entity name, which means anyone can start up at similar site and name it the very same thing, which would further erode efforts to build a loyal audience:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month denied its application to trademark “Truth Social,” citing the “likelihood of confusion” to other similarly named companies, including an app, “VERO — True Social,” first released in 2015.

Usage is also fading, especially since the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, with its views plummeting to about 300,000 a day, down from 1.5 million on the day of its launch.

Looks like the “great businessman” is about to destroy yet another company.

 

Categories
Business Donald Trump The Trump Organization

Guilty Plea By Trump Org. CFO Means ‘It’s All Over’ For Donald’s Company: Former Prosecutor

Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization is on the verge of reaching an agreement with prosecutors in which he will plead guilty to multiple felony charges, including tax fraud.

The Washington Post notes, however, that Weisselberg will not agree to testify against Trump:

The specific terms of any plea agreement were not immediately clear. One of the people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity, said they expected Weisselberg to be sentenced to about five months behind bars. The person also said Weisselberg is not expected to help with an ongoing inquiry into Trump, who is facing legal scrutiny from multiple directions.

Weisselberg was charged with more than a dozen felony counts when he was indicted last year, among them grand larceny and criminal tax fraud. Before the indictment, a person familiar with the investigation into Trump’s finances had said prosecutors hoped to convince Weisselberg to testify against the former president as part of a deal that would reduce his own legal jeopardy.

Despite no cooperation from Weisselberg when it comes to helping convict Trump, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, the upcoming guilty plea is the end of Donald Trump’s company.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Weissmann explained:

“The reason that is important for Donald Trump is the Trump Organization is scheduled for trial in October. Once Allen Weisselberg pleads guilty, it is over for the Trump Organization. The crimes he committed, get imputed to the Trump Organization. So, the leverage in terms of the financial consequences to Donald Trump doesn’t mean he’s gonna go to jail, but the consequences for the Trump Organization are huge.”

Weissmann added that everything is falling apart for the disgraced ex-president on the legal front:

“This is a big deal. So, I think that would be number one, focus on the financial consequences of the Allen Weisselberg deal. And then, down the road, I mean, Lawrence, you laid out a litany of criminal and national security trouble, in Florida, in D.C., in Georgia. And this is a day where you saw a movement on all fronts. And to me, the thing that I thought was probably the most telling was the grand jury subpoena to Eric Herschmann. There is a guy who can completely corroborate what we heard from Cassidy Hutchinson. I am sure he has information.”

Could Donald Trump soon be facing imprisonment and the implosion of his corporation? It certainly looks that way, and it couldn’t possibly happen to a more deserving person.

Categories
Business Congress GOP

Lauren Boebert’s Shooters Grill Has Gone Belly Up

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) loves to brag about how she managed to start a small business even though she didn’t graduate from high school. To hear her tell it, she pulled herself up by the bootstraps and got her piece of the American dream.

But that dream — which Boebert named Shooters Grill — is now a failure and a little more than a bad memory, according to Colorado Pols:

As readers know, Shooter’s Grill lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during its few years of operation according to tax filings, and the eatery never lived down the 2017 incident in which Boebert’s food truck sickened dozens of spectators at a local rodeo. Quality food and service was never the draw of Shooter’s Grill, of course, bringing in customers (at least once for the novelty) with their armed and generally young female wait staff.

Boebert reportedly waited until after the June 28th primary to make the decision about closing Shooter’s Grill after the building’s landlord signaled his intention to cancel Boebert’s lease at the end of August. With Boebert’s Republican primary opponent dispatched, Boebert’s cash flow from her newfound fame looks secure enough to dispense with the dirty work of running a small-town greasy spoon–management of which Boebert had reportedly already farmed out to political supporters.

Join the good citizens of Rifle in wishing Shooter’s Grill a fond covfefe.

You probably recall one of the things that made Shooters so unique (not to mention absurd) is that all of the employees were encouraged to openly carry weapons in keeping with the right-wing belief that guns were given to us by God and therefore deserve to be worshiped like some sort of fire-breathing idol.

The closing of Shooters also deprives Boebert of her talking point about being a successful businesswoman. Instead, she’s a miserable failure, just like her tangerine lord and savior, Donald Trump.

Now that karma is catching up with Lauren in such a big way, we can also hope that voters in her district will kick her to the curb come November.

 

Categories
Business Social Media

Elon Musk Says He’s Terminating His Purchase Of Twitter – But Legally He Can’t

After today, Elon Musk may want to change his last name to Mush, because his self-hyped proffer to buy Twitter is now on the rocks, and his attempt to extract himself from the deal is likely to cost him a cool fortune and may not happen at all, according to legal experts.

On Friday, attorneys for Musk filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to void the $44 billion deal. They also sent a letter to Twitter’s board of directors announcing termination of the deal. Musk and his lawyers maintain that he has every right to pull the plug on acquiring the social media giant because the company hasn’t provided enough information about the company, writing:

“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”

Twitter was in no mood to debate Musk and made it clear they will force him to go through with the deal by taking him to court, with board chairman Bret Taylor noting:

“The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

Legal experts, the Washington Post reports, agree with Twitter that Musk cannot just void the deal and get off the hook for the $44 billion he pledged to pay:

His April agreement to buy the company included a commitment to go through with the acquisition unless there’s a major change to the business, and legal experts say nothing has happened to meet that threshold. Musk has previously threatened to scuttle the deal if Twitter didn’t give him more data to run his own analysis on how many spam bots it has, while Twitter has said it can’t give up personal information on its users like their names, emails and IP addresses, which it uses to come up with its own bot numbers.

Musk, according to those familiar with corporate law, agreed to buy the company as is, not some version of it after it met certain conditions that were never part of the original agreement.

Some suspect the real reason for Musk’s reluctance to complete the purchase is that he no longer has the capital needed due to significant losses of Tesla shares on the stock market. Those shares were a major portion of the money Musk put down to guarantee he was serious about the acquisition.

In the first six months of 2022, Musk’s wealth has plunged by $62 billion, and further reversals in the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indexes could more than double that amount by the end of the year.

Elon Musk is starting to sound like he’s almost as bad of a businessman as former president Donald Trump. But then again, no one is that incompetent.

 

Categories
Business Donald Trump The Trump Organization

Trump Organization Facing Financial Collapse After Accounting Firm Cuts Ties: Report

Now that his longtime accounting firm has given him the boot and declared that his financial statements cannot be believed, failed former President Donald Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, are facing a major financial crisis that could well send the real estate mogul’s business into collapse .

On Monday, Mazars USA LLP released a letter stating that the Trump Organization’s financial statements from 2011 through 2020 “should no longer be relied upon,” which suggests the ex-president’s company has engaged in systematic fraud in order to obtain large bank loans to keep Trump Org. afloat.

With nearly $600 million in loans coming due over the next four years, Trump is already trying to locate financing that will allow him to stay in business.

But banks are probably not going to be willing to help prop up a company that’s facing legal jeopardy on multiple fronts and has now been outed as having lied about its assets.

According to attorney George Conway, the former president is facing almost certain bankruptcy, telling CNN host John Berman:

“This is about as calamitous a thing as could happen to a business as you could imagine, other than getting indicted and going bankrupt, and this could lead to going bankrupt.”

Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien echoed Conway in an article he wrote for Bloomberg, noting:

The Trumps, like most real estate developers, rely on massive bank loans to finance their operations. Their company has more than $590 million of debt coming due within the next four years, and Trump himself has personally guaranteed more than half of it. Banks are likely to find it untenable to keep doing business with a company or individuals already rejected by their own accountants.

The Trump Organization is now on the brink of complete financial collapse, and it could be only a matter of months before indictments are handed down in New York against the former president’s company and other members of his family (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka) who work there.

Perhaps George Conway put it best with this tweet: