The story honestly delivers much better than the simple schadenfreude that the headline would imply.
TMTG was set to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Digital World Acquisition. However, Litinsky and Moss are now alleging in their lawsuit that Trump sought to "drastically dilute" the shares of the company in an "11th hour, pre-merger corporate maneuvering" scheme.
Initially, Trump's stake was 78 million shares, valued at roughly $3.5 billion. UAV's stake in the company amounted to seven million shares valued at approximately $339 million. However, the lawsuit alleges Trump then engaged in a "dilution scheme" to increase the number of total shares to one billion, which they said had "no legitimate business purpose." UAV accused Trump of possibly scheming to distribute the additional shares among himself and his family, while significantly decreasing their stake in the company to less than 1%.
"[UAV was] promised 8.6 percent of this company and sadly its business partners are baselessly trying to renege," Litinsky and Moss' attorney, Christopher J. Clark — who has previously represented Hunter Biden, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban — told the Post.
"They feel like: We made Truth Social for you. You get 90 percent. But some people just aren’t happy with 90 percent."
It's like a perfect Russian-nesting-doll storm of greed, incompetence, and malice. In ordinary circumstances, I would say it's plausible that the whole thing is a ploy to delay the IPO, because no one would be greedy and illogical enough to fuck up the process of inflating their 90% stake by spending any attention on a craven and self-defeating attempt to claw the last 10% away from the people who are, as far as I know, still actually doing all the work.
But this is Trump. Craven and self-defeating is in him at a molecular level. I would guess that some lawyer of his has already been on the receiving end of a HUGE yelling fit about how unfair it is that someone would try to stop him taking the remaining 10% as is his God given right.