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Andy Litinsky, who helped start the former president’s social media company, revealed Mr. Trump’s last-minute doubts about an agreement that made them all very wealthy.
Former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company is currently worth over $6 billion. But the agreement that set the stage for its stock market debut in March was nearly derailed years earlier by Mr. Trump, who is now the biggest beneficiary of its richly valued stock, one of the firm’s co-founders said on Wednesday.
Andy Litinsky, who helped start Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, testified in federal court that he had doubts about whether Mr. Trump would agree to take the firm public by merging it with a cash-rich shell company, even as the deal-signing ceremony was set to take place at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in late 2021.
Mr. Litinsky, a former contestant on Mr. Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice,” said that before the ceremony, Mr. Trump had asked him whether he should go ahead with the merger of Trump Media and the shell company, Digital World Acquisition Corporation.
Mr. Litinsky was in court in Manhattan testifying as a witness in an insider trading trial that arose from an investigation of traders who made millions of dollars with well-timed purchases of Digital World’s stock before the merger announcement on Oct. 20, 2021.
Mr. Litinsky testified that after his conversation with Mr. Trump on that day in October 2021, he was left uncertain about whether the former president would sign the merger agreement. But Mr. Litinsky added that it was hard for him to know the thoughts “in former President Trump’s brain.”
Earlier in his testimony, Mr. Litinsky described Mr. Trump as “the ultimate decision maker.”
Whatever last-minute doubts Mr. Trump may have harbored, he signed the merger agreement. After a lengthy delay, the deal was completed on March 25, and Trump Media became a publicly traded company flush with nearly $300 million in cash and a red-hot stock. For his involvement in the company, Mr. Trump was awarded a roughly 65 percent stake.
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