Michael Popok at MeidasTouch is a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer. He knows what he is talking about. He argues that there are dozens of lawyers in Delaware who are right now searching for anyone who lost money on Truth Social stock, because there is a class action lawsuit coming that just writes itself.
The rules for being an officer and/or a stockholder in a publicly traded company are very different than the rules for a family-owned business. Trump can brag and lie all he wants about Trump Inc because only his family owns an interest in the company. But when you are operating a publicly traded company, making false statements to artificially keep a stock price high, despite contradictory evidence in audited financial statements, is known on Wall Street as a pump-and-dump scheme. Those false statement can be a cause for fines and penalties from the SEC. But even more importantly, those false statements can be used by private shareholders who may have lost money on the stock as a result. Even a shareholder who owns one share, and may have only lost twelve dollars in the past week, has a right to sue the blathering idiot who claims that Truth Social is a thriving enterprise, when the SEC filings show that it is flailing and likely to fail. Then that lawsuit can be expanded to include the class of all stockholders who also lost money. There are literally billions of dollars at stake.
Popok uses Trump’s recent social media posts bragging about how great Truth Social is and how valuable its stock shares are as a straightforward example of pumping and dumping. Even if the SEC might be reluctant to fine a Presidential candidate, financial legal specialists will have no such qualms. The lawyers are already frothing at the mouth and fighting for their place at the trough.
