Donald Trump needs cash. The once-and-possibly future president owes over $450 million after a New York judge found he defrauded banks by inflating the value of his assets to secure favorable loans. He also owes $83.3 million from the E. Jean Carroll defamation ruling, $110,000 for defying a subpoena, and $15,000 for disparaging a law clerk. And his bills from fighting so many disparate criminal and civil court battles are adding up; last year alone, the former president funneled $50 million from two of his Super PACs to his legal defense.

In court, Trump’s lawyers insinuated that he doesn’t even have $450 million—not in cash, at least, unsuccessfully appealing to get the penalty lowered to a $100 million bond. So, where is Trump going to get all of this money? Oddly, the answer might lie in Truth Social, the social media app that Trump and his associates started after he was summarily booted from Twitter (now X) in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Trump’s financial future now hinges on some of the strangest fads in corporate finance—meme stocks, SPAC deals, and cult-of-personality investing. If Trump can find a way to act fast, it might just be the bailout he desperately needs.

Truth Social is a bad imitation of Twitter, where Trump was an unavoidable presence long before he ran for president. It’s chock full of stale red-pilled memes, MAGA conspiracy theories, and of course, Trump. That’s the main draw. Truth Social is the only place the former president now regularly posts his unfettered thoughts.

Unsurprisingly, Truth Social hasn’t found mass appeal. It had a paltry 5.4 million total visitors last month, according to Similarweb, and made only $3.4 million from advertising in the first nine months of 2023, according to a regulatory filing by its corporate partner. (For reference: Twitter made more than $1 billion in advertising with 237.8 million daily users in its final quarter as a public company in 2022.) Truth Social’s ads aren’t from, er, prestige brands either—a recent scroll through the app surfaced ads for a “Trump signature trading card,” the website gutcleanseprotocol.com, and Covfefe brand coffee.

But because of a quirky bit of financial engineering, and maybe the power of Trump’s hyped-up political base, Truth Social’s parent company is set to go public in the coming weeks once it merges with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a deal that would bring the merged company’s valuation to around $9 billion—a market capitalization on par with Match Group, Skechers, and Lufthansa. Trump’s own stake would be worth nearly $4 billion at current value, which would comfortably cover his current legal expenses.

Truth Social is owned by a company called Trump Media and Technology Group. It is not going public through the traditional method—an initial public offering, or IPO—but through an alternative route called a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company. SPACs are blank-check companies that have no business but are allowed to go public and then merge with a real business in order to help take it public.

Typically, “a company has been operating for a while, and you have years of financials, and an investment bank looks it over, and there are all of these public filings, and then it goes public in this fairly rigorous process where the investment bank is strictly liable—it’s on the hook for anything said that’s a lie, basically,” said Usha Rodrigues, a professor at University of Georgia School of Law. But Truth Social wasn’t even a functioning business when the merger was announced in October 2021—the social media app didn’t launch until February 2022.

Michael Ohlrogge, a professor at New York University School of Law, says that SPACs aren’t necessarily an easier path to going public. “This has been an extremely slow, expensive, uncertain process with an enormous amount of scrutiny from the SEC,” he said in an email. He suspects that a big, established investment bank wouldn’t have wanted to take on the “liability and reputational risk” of doing an IPO for this merger, but a less prestigious bank may have.

SPACs were trendy back in 2021 when the deal was announced. In the early-pandemic bull market, SPACs (which date back to the early 1990s) had a resurgence in popularity, taking companies like DraftKings, SoFi, and Nikola Corp. public.

Michael Klausner, a professor at Stanford Law School, says that the “share price of many, many SPACs—for a period of time around their merger—is out of line with their true value.” But he’s seen SPACs bought up by retail investors—just because they’re SPACs—and driven far above their value, only to descend when the hype dies down. “Very, very few are up now.”

Still, the Trump Media deal is significantly stranger. Its SPAC, called Digital World Acquisition Company, has effectively given investors a way to invest in Trump—and it’s given Trump a way to capitalize on his own brand.

DWAC is best thought of as a meme stock. You may remember the meme stock fad from when retail investors on Reddit successfully coordinated a short squeeze with GameStop stock, before glomming onto a series of other millennial nostalgia brands like AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Meme stocks are often publicly traded companies that attract an inordinate percentage of individual investors and their stock performance fluctuates in a way that’s significantly divorced from the reality of their underlying business. Combine those two trends and you’ll start to see why Trump’s media company could be valued at roughly $9 billion if it merges with DWAC.

Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida, says meme stocks often depend on the “greater fool theory of investing,” meaning rational investors might buy in expecting the stock price to rise and betting that they can sell their shares to a greater fool willing to buy them at a higher price. In this case, however, Ritter speculates there is an inordinate number of individual retail investors compared to institutional investors, such as hedge funds, that normally own SPAC shares prior to a merger. “Here you’ve got ideology involved [too]—as far as I can tell, the vast majority of DWAC investors are Trump political investors, and they’re to some degree putting their money where their mouth is… My suspicion is most of them have bought the stock as a show of political support.” In this way, Trump is conducting yet another public fundraising from his supporters—this time through the public markets.

The process to take Trump Media public has taken two full years because the deal was subject to a federal investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which brought securities fraud charges against DWAC for illegally holding merger talks with Trump and Co. before it itself went public. DWAC settled the charges for $18 million with the SEC and got the green light to merge in February, which shareholders will vote to do on March 22. If they approve the merger—which they’re expected to—it would give Trump nearly $4 billion worth of equity in the company. The question then will be how can he possibly cash out?

DWAC stock looks like the financial incarnation of a cult of personality. With GameStop, there was a central figure—investor and Chewy founder Ryan Cohen. With AMC, investors hailed CEO Adam Aron as their “silverback,” the king of the “apes” (Reddit users who speculate on and discuss investments like meme stocks), but these influences pale in comparison to the cult of Trump—a force that reached beyond the grasp of Wall Street and Manhattan real estate to capture the bloodred id of post-Obama America. Trump has built both his business and political careers to appear as the embodiment of wealth—with this stock, he’s giving his faithful the opportunity to join him—or, at least, fund him—through investment.

The problem for Trump here is that when he tries to sell stock, it very well may tank the whole enterprise. (He’s technically restricted from selling stock for six months after the deal closes, but could get a waiver from the board of directors.) “The faster he sells and the more he sells the quicker the stock price will decline,” Ritter said. Another major problem would be if the deal to go public is stalled by a lawsuit—such as a recent one brought against Trump Media from embittered cofounders, who claim their share in the company was diluted by Trump and his allies.

Trump might be able to borrow money with his stock as collateral as a way to gain access to money more quickly, but he would have to either get an exemption from the post-merger company or just move ahead without one and hope that the board lets it slide, Ohlrogge said, since the terms of the agreement with DWAC don’t allow it. “If there were a bank that did take such a deal [allowing Trump to use his stock as collateral], it would raise serious concerns that the bank is doing it for reasons other than a belief it is a profitable lending opportunity,” he said. “Namely, it would raise concerns that the bank is doing it in order to win influence with someone who might become US president. If that bank were affiliated directly or indirectly with a foreign government, it would be even more concerning still.”

Trump’s finances have long been a mystery. The former president has consistently refused to lay bare his full tax returns and give the American people an honest accounting of his finances. It’s safe to assume Trump is rich, but how rich is he really? The answer matters.

“There’s a reason why political candidates have to file their personal financial disclosure forms with the Federal Election Commission,” said Sarah Bryner of the money-in-politics research group Open Secrets. “It’s because the voters need to know whether the politicians are likely to be subject to quid pro quo corruption. If somebody has a lot of debt, if someone has a lot of liability, they are more vulnerable to be manipulated by bribery.” Voters also need to know when politicians are serving in the public interest or their own financial interest.

Trump is no stranger to these conflicts of interest. As president, Trump and his Secret Service protection routinely stayed at Trump Organization properties, and foreign officials regularly patronized the former Trump International Hotel in DC during his presidency.

“After the 1980 election, Reagan and Bush, who were both fantastically wealthy, put everything in a blind trust and had this speech about how Americans needed to believe that their president and their vice president were always acting in the best interest of Americans, not of themselves,” said Jordan Libowitz of the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “There was this idea that even the idea of corruption was just as bad as being a corrupt president because you’d lose the faith of the American people.” But Trump is different. Libowitz added: “Trump is very clear he’s doing everything to benefit his own bottom line, and we need to see just how.”

Truth Social wouldn’t be worth much absent Trump, Libowitz says: “If it were anyone else running this identical company, it wouldn’t be worth a fraction of [the price]. It’s about buying the Trump name.” Long past any concern over his name being bought and sold, Trump is now in a hurry to make one more sale before he can’t pay his bills.