Elon Musk is now the brand new owner of Twitter after purchasing the social media company for $44 billion. The closing of the deal comes after months of lawsuits and comments about Twitter.
All that’s left now, is the return of former US president Donald Trump to the Twittersphere. However, it is still unclear whether he will be allowed back, considering Musk’s statement about his reason for buying the platform.
But should the leader of the Republican party return, what does that mean for his social media platform, Truth Social? To most, it will signal that the former reality-TV-star-turned-politician’s venture failed.
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It’s not like the platform launched to a resounding start either. Plagued by technical issues on its first day, Trump himself didn’t post on the platform daily until it was up and running to some degree.
Despite a launch on the Apple App Store, it took nearly 12 months for it to come to Android users on the Google Play Store, primarily because the platform had failed to moderate calls for violence.
In the last few months, the stock price for the platform’s parent company, Trump Technology and Media Group has been taking a beating. Projections from November 21 had shown that Truth Social was expected to grow to 56 million users by 2024 and 82 million by 2026. In addition, average revenue earned per consumer was projected to go up to $13.5 by 2026.
With regard to daily active users, the app has fared poorly with only 513,000 DAUs and only about 2 million monthly users. For the sake of comparison, prior to being banned for his role in the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, the former president had 88 million active users.
It doesn’t end there. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had herself dumped money into the company which was in talks to take Truth Social public. Greene invested somewhere between $15,001 and $50,000, into Digital World Acquisition Corp. to acquire the social media platform. However, after fellow investors pulled out, Greene was left holding the bag with her original investment’s stock value crashing by 82% according to Market Insider. To sum it up, the election-denying Georgia representative has lost anywhere between $12,330 and $41,100 on her original investment.