Thread by @joshtpm

Truth Social just released their 8-K, so the SEC mandated disclosures where you can't lie without commiting a crime. Lots of focus on the dollars, which are hilarious: Just over $4.1 M in revenue, $58M in costs. ... app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadF…

I've mentioned before that this is only barely more than TPM brings in each year and since we're a real business we have costs well under $58m. But these aren't the important data points in this filing. In theory a social platform can be losing a lot of money and still ...

3/ legitimately be worth a ton of money. Facebook had already become a force of nature before Zuckerberg even real turned his attention to monetization. That turned out to be a really good idea. He put his energy into building network effects, platform dominance and only after...

4/ he'd basically won that game did he turn in earnest to monetization. So even though Truth Social losing a ton of money and only having very meager revenue makes it seem like a joke, it doesn't prove it's a joke. For the proof you need to skip down to the 4th paragraph under...

5/ Overview. And then you also look at the section titled Key Operating Metrics, which you can see here.

6/ Here it tells us that "adhering to traditional key performance indicators ... could potentially divert its focus from strategic evaluation with respect to the progress and growth of its business." Among those "traditional" indicators it includes ad impressions and ...

7/ revenue per user. Again, that's reasonable in theory. That's monetization not building the engine, if we go back to the Facebook analogy. But it also includes "active user accounts including monthly and daily active users". This is where you get the hard record scratch ...

8/ sound effect straight to bullshitville. It goes on to say that it may NEVER release those numbers. What this means is they are going to release no information about how many people use Truth Social or the details of that use. As noted, Truth Social has trivial levels of ...

9/ and like 15x the expenses. So business bleeding money like crazy. But if this two year old social network were in the process of building a robust user base which showed strong signs of on-going growth that might not matter. Again, think of Zuckerberg riding a tiger ...

10/ of explosive network/platform growth and focusing on that over near-term monetization. Truth Social is saying that it won't tell investors how many users it has, how quickly that base is growing or what its characteristics are. In fact, it says there's a good chance ...

11/ it won't ever release that data. This is clear cut. This company has zero actual value. The best case for its value is that they haven't actually tried to build the user base. So it's as tho it was still a prospectus with an amazing strategy. But in fact it's been around ...

12/ for two years and has an INSANE amount of publicity behind it. Again, this company has no value. Or I guess better to say that whatever value it may have is premised on the say so of Donald Trump.