Trump's Truth Social Is a Meme Stock—So What Happens Next?
Inside the Hive
Vanity Fair
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2024
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Host Brian Stelter speaks with journalist Scott Nover about how Donald Trump, in the midst of legal and financial turmoil, just got a huge lifeline by way of Truth Social. No, the social media network for the MAGA crowd isn’t suddenly a raging success. But through a “meme stock media merger,” as Nover recently described it for Vanity Fair, the presumptive GOP nominee netted billions this week—at least on paper. Questions remain, though, as to how and when Trump can actually take this money out of the market?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Radika Jones, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. |
| 0:05.0 | If you love digging into the week's political headlines, |
| 0:08.0 | subscribe to Vanity Fair. |
| 0:10.0 | Our reporters take you behind the scenes of some of the biggest stories from the campaign |
| 0:14.9 | trail to the halls of Congress. |
| 0:17.5 | Just for our Inside the Hive listeners, save 15% on a yearly digital subscription to Vanity Fair with promo code |
| 0:24.4 | pod 15 that's vanity fare.com promo code pod 15 for 15% off one year of all you can |
| 0:32.3 | read watch and hear. Vanity Fair. Scott, how much is Donald Trump's so-called true social actually worth? |
| 0:54.1 | Well, right now, according to its performance |
| 0:56.2 | on the stock market, it's worth upwards of $6 billion, |
| 0:59.6 | but there's really no reason that it should |
| 1:01.5 | be worth anywhere near that. |
| 1:03.0 | Truth Social is a social network with a few million users and a few million dollars in ad revenue every year. |
| 1:10.0 | That valuation, those billions of dollars, doesn't really make any sort of sense in the business context. |
| 1:15.6 | That is Scott Nover, who recently wrote all about this for Vanity Fair. |
| 1:20.0 | He's also a contributing writer at Slate. |
| 1:22.8 | And I'm Brian Selter. |
| 1:25.0 | Welcome to Inside the Hive from Vanity Fair. |
| 1:28.3 | Today we are going inside Trump's living contradiction |
| 1:32.2 | of a social network. It is called true social as you know, but it is full of untruths. |
| 1:39.0 | It's a company that Trump founded shortly after being kicked off Twitter in 2021. |
| 1:44.0 | And now, as of this week, it has merged with a Shell company called Digital World Acquisition |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -364 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vanity Fair, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Vanity Fair and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.