When Banks Say No To Trump, Jeff Yass Says YASS!

Taking Truth Social public means a hot cash injection is coming.

As we all await the seizure of Trump properties and the renaming of Trump Tower to The Letitia James Center For Goosing Donald Trump In The Taint, #DonPoorleone has found himself a fresh hot beef injection of $$: taking Truth Social public at a valuation of more than $5 billion, which will translate into about $3.5 billion hot clams for the simultaneously very rich and very poor rapist fraudster. It will trade under DJT, of course.

Well, that’s peculiar, you say. Who’d invest in that dreck? Hasn’t his Twitter ripoff been losing money? Why, it sure has! In the first nine months of 2023 it had $3.3 million in revenue, and lost $49 million. It has 5 million users, compared to TikTok’s 2 billion users and Facebook’s 3 billion, with B’s.

Maybe it’s poised for beautiful tremendous big growth, the likes of which you or I have never seen? But that would depend on attracting new advertisers and eyeballs, and your Disneys and Proctor and Gambles have shown no sign of wanting to change their minds. The site must make do with crypto scammers, ball tanners, and boner supplements made out of old Chinese newspapers.

Then there’s the fact that Trump’s companies have declared bankruptcy six times. 

Attracting new users, as if. So who in their right minds would want to go into business with that guy? A billionaire sugarddady named Jeffrey Yass, as it turns out. (Does he have a brother named Hugh? We demand to know!) Reported the NYT, Yass’s company is Truth Social’s biggest institutional investor.

A December regulatory filing showed that Mr. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corp., which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday. That stake, of about 605,000 shares, was worth about $22 million based on Digital World’s last closing share price. Yass’s firm is also a big shareholder in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.

But Trump’s sudden reversal on his previously firm stance that TikTok should be banned is surely a coincidence! (It’s not.)

And then there’s the fact that the SEC had been holding up the merger because Digital World traders were caught insider-trading based on Trump’s blabs on the golf course, and is under ongoing investigation from the FBI, the SEC and Homeland Security for its suspicious ties to foreign investors. Ya don’t say!

Sadly, Trump still won’t be able to put his stubby paws on that money immediately. Truth Social’s funding partner, Digital World Acquisition, approved the merger with Trump Media & Technology Group just Friday, and rules prevent him from selling shares or using shares as collateral for a bond for the next six months. But every little bit helps.

So who is this Yass? Why, the richest man in Pennsylvania, as it turns out. He built his fortunes from betting on horses, dogs, and jai alai, as well as playing poker, and got himself a seat on the Philadelphia stock exchange backed by billionaire Israel Englander. Reported Philadelphia Magazine in a fawning 2009 article, “Beating The Odds”:

The betting philosophy was pretty straightforward: Basically, if you bet enough money, covering a high enough percentage of possible winners, you’ll win often enough to come out ahead. Never mind that you’ll lose more often than you’ll win, because when you win, you can win big.

That sure seems to be the strategy here. What’s losing a billion, if you win an entire president? And his bets are surely hedged.

Yass has also been bankrolling Israel's move farther to the right and its judicial coup via the Kohelet Policy Forum, what Haaretz called “effectively recasting Israeli right-wing ideology in an American-libertarian image: right-wing, Jewish nationalism coupled to conservative economics.” He was also a big donor to libertarian Gary Johnson. (Remember him?)

And he’s a big old tax avoider, getting his short-term trades taxed at the long-term investment rate and saving about $1 billion in the process. A man after Trump’s own heart!

We don’t mean to nag, but if Trump had started his billionaire group project sooner than the night before it was due, he could have pulled his bailout band together a lot sooner. He also could have made a deal with the government to admit wrongdoing and pay up years ago, would’ve had to pay a lot less, and probably wouldn’t be facing losing his business licenses either. But planning for consequences is not his style, so here come the right-wing billionaires, riding to his rescue, saving him from having to shake a tin can in the subway. Must be nice!