Trump pass his billions of Dollar Position in stock market

Donald Trump appears to be scrambling for funds to pay a $464m (£365m) fraud fine. Could the stock market ride to his rescue?

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, is poised to become a publicly listed company, after a majority of shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp voted on Friday to acquire it.

Mr Trump is due to have a stake of at least 58% in the merged company, worth nearly $3bn at Digital World's current share prices.

It's an astonishing potential windfall for Mr Trump in exchange for a business whose own auditor warned last year it was at risk of failure.

Never mind the many red flags associated with the deal, including unresolved lawsuits from former business partners. There's also an $18m settlement that Digital World agreed to pay last year to resolve fraud charges over how the merger plan came together.

Shares in Digital World dropped more than 13% on Friday after the approval, ending the day at $36.94.

Backers of Digital World - the vast majority of whom are individual investors instead of Wall Street firms, many apparently Trump loyalists - seemed unfazed.

"This is just the start," Chad Nedohin, a deal supporter, said on his show DWAC Live on the video platform Rumble after the approval was announced. "There's no reason to freak out."

Digital World, or DWAC (pronounced D-whack), is what is known as a SPAC, or a shell business created expressly to buy another firm and take it public.

But even after Friday's slide, they still imply Trump Media has a value of almost $5bn, which is a lot given it brought in just $3.3m in revenue in the first nine months of last year and lost nearly $50m.

The merger will provide an influx of more than $200m in cash to Trump Media, which it could use for growth and expansion.

But for now Truth Social, which launched to the general public in 2022, branding itself as an alternative to major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, remains small.

It claims about 8.9 million sign-ups and in regulatory filings Trump Media warns prospective investors that it does not track metrics like user growth or engagement that could give them a sense of its operations. And it says it has little intention of doing so.

Outside firms estimate Truth Social received about five million visits in February. By comparison, Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, and recently valued by one investor at about $14bn, received more than 100 million visits.

"It's an enormous transfer of value from [investors]... to Trump, which stands to be extremely lucrative for him," says Michael Ohlrogge, a law professor at New York University who has studied listings of companies such as Trump Media.