I’ve had several readers ask me about the Trump Media deal, which is an announced plan to take a new company, Trump Media & Technology, public through a merger with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC). It has generated a lot of attention for sure, and the stock price has soared, but so far it’s just a press release and a big-picture presentation, as of this morning there are no detailed filings or disclosures about the deal filed with the SEC, and very little reporting about any details that are not in the press release.

Which tells me that this is a fan appreciation event so far, currently building into a meme stock frenzy, it’s not what I’d call an investment. Neither Trump Media nor the SPAC sponsors have filed anything real beyond the press release announcement, and there are no financials mentioned at all in any of their materials that I have found. SPAC mergers generally try to sell investors on the idea by making projections for what a company might have in revenue or earnings in the coming years, or even how the capital will be deployed in developing a product or service, and while rumors often leak before a deal is done, they’re not usually announced without details. This time, though, no details yet.

Partly that’s because Trump Media is a new company that does not seem to have much of a business yet, they were only incorporated in February, and their initial social media product, Truth, which seems to be their only active project, is not in beta testing yet. Presumably the SPAC has more information than they’re giving out at the moment, but there’s not even a hypothetical for how much they’ll spend to build their Twitter competitor or on any of their other future plans, just a mention that they will have about $300 million in cash from the SPAC and an enterprise value of $875 million, with the potential for that to double if the Trump Media folks hit their earnout targets and are granted additional shares. Barron’s notes that the $875 million includes $500 million in debt, but that’s not specified by the company. That much debt wouldn’t make sense for a tech development or media company, since those kinds of startups don’t generally have the cash flow to service debt, but maximizing debt or launching a ...