Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) soared on Monday as it confirmed its merger with Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG) and after former president Donald Trump managed to get his bond in his civil fraud case reduced ahead of the company’s listing on Tuesday.
DWAC’s stock closed the day at nearly $50 a share, up more than 35 percent, according to Google Finance, after the company said that it had completed its merger with Trump’s TMTG. The company also announced that, on Tuesday, it will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbols “DJT”, which match the initials of Trump’s name.
“Today marks a pivotal moment not only for DWAC and TMTG as a combined entity, but for the broader media and technology landscape,” Eric Swider, former CEO of Digital World and a new director of TMTG, said in a statement.
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The former president owns about 58 percent of the new company and the completion of its merger comes amid an appeals court decision on Monday to bring down a bond required to appeal his New York civil fraud case to $175 million from an initial potential payment of about $454 million after he was judged to have inflated his assets.
Some analysts suggested that the ruling may have helped the performance of the stock, but retail traders helped push up the shares of DWAC ahead of the listing on Tuesday.
“The day of symbol change on these things you often see massive upmoves. Retail traders are all over this today for that,” Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, told Newsweek.
Asked if news of the bond reduction contributed to the stock price move, Tuttle said, “everything’s a factor but I think it’s the retail guys really pushing.”
Newsweek contacted a representative of TMTG for comment via email on Monday. We will update the story with any information we receive.
DWAC was a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) launched in part to seek mergers with other businesses. TMTG runs Truth Social, a social media platform that launched in February 2022 as an alternative to other established social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, after Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024, was banned from those spaces.
The company sees itself as an alternative space online. Its leadership echoed those sentiments on Monday upon the announcement of its merger conclusion with DWAC.
“As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the Internet from Big Tech censors,” TMTG CEO Devin Nunes, a former GOP Congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and is longtime backer of Trump, said in a statement.
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