While disgraced former president Donald Trump may pretend to be friends with rapper Kanye West, a move West made to buy the right-wing Parler social media site has negatively impacted the stock price of Trump’s Truth Social site.
Forbes reports that in Monday trading, Trump’s company lost a full 8% of its share price.
Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), the special purpose acquisition company with turbulent plans to merge with Truth Social’s parent Trump Media and Technology Group, fell 8% to $16.11 Monday as a new brash billionaire threw his hat into the conservative social media ring.
Even worse for Trump is the fact that shares of DWAC are down 70% so far this year as Elon Musk begins to make rumblings about going through with his plans to acquire Twitter, a promise Musk has previously made and then backed away from.
West was booted from Twitter and Instagram for anti-Semitic comments in which he suggested that he was planning to carry out violence against Jews, with The Washington Post reporting:
His account, @kanyewest, was “locked for violating Twitter’s policies,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email Sunday, declining to state which policy he had violated. The account shows that a recent tweet violated Twitter rules.
Though the tweet is no longer visible on his account, screenshots shared widely on social media show that Ye had said he would go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to Defcon, the U.S. military defense readiness system. In the tweet, he used antisemitic tropes and said he could not be antisemitic “because black people are actually Jew also.”
A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram formerly known as Facebook, said in an email that the platform “deleted content from @kanyewest for violating our policies and placed a restriction on the account. We may place restrictions on accounts that repeatedly break our rules, for example, we may temporarily restrict them from posting, commenting, or sending DMs.” Screenshots of the post show that Ye had posted an apparent conversation with the rapper Diddy, employing antisemitic tropes to allege that he was being influenced by Jewish people.
For months how, there have been reports that the inability of Trump and others to raise additional capital to keep Truth Social afloat will lead to a financial collapse before the end of 2022.
