Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Surprise!

You mean people dumped the stock in hopes of taking a profit before everyone else realized what a sham it was? Or maybe reality just caught up with the fantasy:

Creating a large, scalable and reliable technology platform takes time, commitment and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. Large technology teams have to be hired and retained along with a tremendous number of servers to store and distribute content. Usually a start-up will lean on Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure to provide this service in the short-term and potentially longer-term. However, just because the hardware portion is outsourced doesn’t mean TMTG won’t need a large and skillful technology team.
I still think most of the "investors" were looking to score one off the rubes who would buy in ten minutes later and hold on ten minutes too long.  I mean, it's not like serious investors were swayed by this:

TMTG or former President Trump’s Technology Media & Technology Group posted a 22-page presentation overviewing what it will try and accomplish. It outlines on slide 7 that it will first be going after Twitter and Facebook, along with creating what looks like a subscription offering similar to Netflix NFLX -1% and Disney+. At the same time it plans to take on CNN and iHeartMEDIA (the largest owner of radio stations) and in the future create a tech stack that goes up against Amazon’s AMZN +1.8% AWS, Google’s GOOG +0.9% Cloud, Microsoft’s MSFT +0.7% Azure and payment processor Stripe. I guess if Trump throws enough company logos onto a slide it will make what is an overpriced SPAC stock look reasonable.
I'm sure there are still some fools out there who think "Trump" on the door means "money magic," but already they have been parted from their money.  And the odds of this thing ever getting off the ground?  Zip and none:

On slide 20 TMTG+ says it is looking to provide “news, big-tent entertainment, exciting documentaries, sports programming and more.” The company appears to want to create a subscription model such as Netflix and Disney+ but with traditional cable or television network offerings.

Netflix and Disney+ have created huge content libraries over multiple years, if not decades, and licensed them in the case of Netflix, which cost and continue to cost billions of dollars on annual basis. If TMTG wants to create this kind of content it will either have to raise a lot more equity or take on hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, in debt like Netflix has done.

Cable and TV networks have large staffs and commit to multi-billion dollar deals with sports leagues. It may be able to leverage some like-minded partners but besides talking heads in a studio having true content takes a lot of money.

...

The presentation points out that Trump had a total of 146.5 million followers composed of 89 million on Twitter, 33 million on Facebook and 24.5 million on Instagram.

Statista estimates that Facebook controls the five largest social networks; Facebook with over 2.8 billion users, You Tube, WhatsApp, Instagram with almost 1.4 billion and Facebook Messenger. Twitter comes in 16th place with about 397 million users.

Trump’s numbers were large but they do not take into account how many were from people that felt “obligated” to follow him when he was President, users who won’t go to the trouble of downloading and using his app and how many were bots.

IOW, Trump isn't even a big fish in a small pond, even back when he was a big fish. 


Trump's investors


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)