Trump Sued By Business Partners Who Were Dumb Enough To Go Into Business With Him
'Surely he won't screw us,' thought idiots, apparently.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A couple of idiots try to go into business with Donald Trump. He agrees to a very generous financial split in his favor. Then he tries to screw the idiots out of their little share, the partnership sours, and lawsuits start flying.
Oh, you have heard this one? Almost literally every week since 1973? How about that.
This news is the latest in the long saga of the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the company that owns Trump’s online Nazi clubhouse, TruthSocial. TMTG was founded in early 2021 when some former contestants on “The Apprentice,” which alone should be enough to set off the stall alarms in any business-oriented cockpit, approached the former president after he got kicked off Twitter for trying to use it to overthrow democracy.
The founders’ pitch was simple: Build a social media site, claim you’re going to compete with and quickly destroy all the established Big Tech companies like Amazon and Apple, and then something something profit. Trump signed on to the plan and took a 90 percent ownership stake in the new entity. The two former gasbags from “The Apprentice,” Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, formed an LLC called United Atlantic Ventures (UAV), which got 8.6 percent. The last 1.4 percent went to an attorney on the deal, who apparently hasn’t read a newspaper since at least the mid-1980s and was thus unaware that anyone entering a deal with Donald Trump should always, always, always, always, and we can’t stress this enough, fucking always get paid upfront.
PREVIOUSLY!
TMTG planned to raise money via an entity called a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a concept Our Liz ably broke down a while back:
It exists to hoover up a bunch of cash, take itself public, and then buy a private company, which is then spared the indignity of disclosing its books as it would have to if it went public on its own. If you were, say, a Dollar Store version of Twitter with no apparent ability to compete with established social media companies and a pitchman who is toxic to half of America (and more or less all of not-America), a SPAC would be a pretty good way to gin up cash.
Frankly, it sounds to us like every other shitty and overvalued investment vehicle that we’ve spent almost our entire adulthood watching crash the economy in one spectacular clusterfuck or another, but we’re not the type of business genius who can compete with Donald Trump.
The idiots who did try to get in bed with Trump this time, Litinsky and Moss, soon found that Trump was not happy with only 90 percent of the shares in a company that is currently valued at $3 billion, based on Thursday’s stock price. He almost immediately started chiseling by trying to talk Litinsky into handing a boatload of his shares over to spousal concubine Melania Trump.
This was the first step in what Litinsky and Moss now claim is an effort to reduce their stake in the merged company:
UAV’s attorneys allege in the motion that Trump has recently attempted to “drastically dilute” the partnership’s stake as part of what they called an “11th hour, pre-merger corporate maneuvering” tactic designed to increase the amount of authorized stock, from 120 million shares to 1 billion shares.
UAV’s attorneys wrote that the “dilution scheme” had “no legitimate business purpose” and suggested that Trump and the Trump Media board planned to issue the new shares to “Trump and/or his associates and children,” watering down UAV’s stake to less than 1 percent.
The merger has long been held up by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been investigating all sorts of shadiness that has clung to this deal like barnacles on a boat hull. Regarding the current dispute with UAV, TMTG and DWAC said in a recent SEC filing that some Trump attorney somewhere “declared void” the original agreement a couple of years ago.
Of course no one would put it past Trump or one of the battalion of idiotic lawyers surrounding him to either be a) lying, or b) declare an agreement void by fiat, without doing any sort of legal work to make it official.
Still, even with all the shadiness that included TMTG being so desperate for cash while it waited for merger approval that it may have taken an $8 million infusion from a Kremlin-linked entity, the SEC recently gave its blessing to the merger, and DWAC’s shareholders planned to vote to finalize it in the coming weeks.
LIKE SO!
Now the whole deal might get held up while this lawsuit, plus a couple of others related to some other accusations of shenanigans the various parties have been throwing at each other, works its way through the chancery courts in Delaware, which is where TMTG was incorporated.
So to sum up, Trump himself may have torpedoed a deal that would have added $3 billion to his net worth, at least on paper, at a time when he is desperate to come up with better than half a billion dollars in three weeks to cover the civil judgments against him in his E. Jean Carroll and New York business fraud trials. All because he apparently couldn’t be satisfied with 90 percent of $3 billion.
There have been people who have been worrying on social media that Trump had found his vehicle to wriggle out of that jam. But even if cashing in all that stock was an option, well, it’s not now.
If people are still, in the year of our Lord 2024 A.D., dumb enough to try and enter into a business deal with Trump, well, our hearts are bleeding. Wait, laughing. Whichever one indicates more contempt.
Because none of this is unusual for Trump, whose entire theory of business is that your parents never hugged you and you have never felt truly loved in all your life so you have to screw everyone you ever work with in some misguided Freudian effort to get revenge on Fred and Mary by directing your hatred at the rest of humanity . Also your brain is a mountain of discarded Super Bowl loser T-shirts moldering away in a Calcutta garbage dump. Have fun selling your properties at fire-sale prices, you putz.
Yr Wonkette is still a few dollars shy of being worth $3 billion, please help.
True story: my father was acquainted with PAB in the 1970s/early ‘80s, when he worked on Wall St. Years ago he told us that Dotard wanted to get into the wine importing business with my father (who knew a good deal about the subject). My father said he turned Dotard down because PAB was the kind of person who (and I quote): “would stab you in the back without a moment’s hesitation.”
It’s almost like Comer has been full of shit this whole time.
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