Friday, December 10, 2021

Vaporware


How much is Agent Orange really worth? One will never truly find out but the take from Poltico piques one's interest, particularly when it comes to tech, code and just how viable is Trump's initiative in the online environment known as the net. 

In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor official.

He's known for making lavish claims about what his “brand” is worth. Others have punctured his estimates as wildly inflated, especially since the reputational hits he took at the end of his presidency. But now we have a new kind of answer, thanks to investors. The Trump aura alone — at least to a media startup — appears to be worth a neat $1 billion.

That’s how much secret financiers are investing in Trump’s newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, which is going public by merging with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition. TMTG, as Bloomberg Opinion’s Timothy L. O’Brien and Matt Levine explain, has no products, no revenue, no cash flow, no known intellectual property, no big names attached and no “clear business plan,” only a wispy promise to build a new social media network (Truth Social) to take on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

The way TMTG has come charging out of the gate with no product and no revenue but ample investors has financial journalists comparing it to a meme stock (like Gamestop, AMC and Blackberry) — securities that appeal to naïve retail investors who willingly ignore business fundamentals and buy depending on which way the social media winds blow.

In other words ... vaporware.

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