even matt levine is losing some creative inspiration to explain trump scams, so back to the basics :

"Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. is an extremely successful company at something. Not media or technology: TMTG’s revenue from its various businesses (mostly Truth Social, plus some financial services stuff) is on the order of $4m/yr, roughly as much as a top Substack newsletter; for this it spends well over $100m/yr and paid its CEO [MAGA cultist devin nunes] almost $47m/yr 2024. If you just look at it as a business, spending $100m/yr to make $4m/year is not a big success [unless you are Nunes!].
But TMTG is, or at least has been, extremely successful at selling stock...
There was a time in my career in financial journalism when people did not go around saying “we do not make a lot of money in our business but we’re extremely good at selling stock.” That was not a thing, or at least it was not a thing to be proud of. The theory was that you would do good business, and you would make sustainable and growing profits from that business (or at least have a good story about how you’d do that eventually), and your stock would be valuable based on that. “A stock price reflects the present value of expected future cash flows to the company,” people would say, smugly. If you answered “ours doesn’t!” people would think there was something wrong with you.
That time is definitively over and I feel like a dinosaur even mentioning it..."
moneystuff