Digital World Acquisition Corporation (NASDAQ: DWAC) is the SPAC that Domald Trump's Truth Social social media site is supposed to come to market through via a merger. When one of the major players in a merger is convicted - in a civil trial, to the standard of balance of probabilities rather than absolute certainty it should be said - then we'd expect those involved in that merger to lose some of their value. Quite the opposite has happened to DWAC over the past few days.
It's possible to ponder why this might be - perhaps the market thinks that an appeal stands a good change. Or that this was so nakedly a political case that it doesn't in fact matter. Or, well, we can all think of reasons - possibly even the embedded patriarchy of American life. The actual truth is that money markets care about money. That's what they're for, that's what they're interested in and that's what will determine the price on money markets - money.
Digital World stock price from NASDAQ
As Forbes noted DWAC rose on the indictment too.
The issue isn't that investors think that sexism is a good thing. Nor even that they don;t agree that it's a bad thing in society at large. They're just saying that it's irrelevant to the issue at hand. Will Truth Social make money and if it merges with DWAC then will current holders of Digital World have more money than they started with? Those are the things - and they're the only things - which determine the price of DWAC.
It's entirely possible to think that Truth Social hasn't been as well managed as perhaps it might have been - we'd tend to that view. We can also wonder about how well the SPAC merger with DWAC is being handled - most of us would hope for better than it has been. But the only thing a social media network really needs is a large enough following - following of anything, person, activity, idea - for there to be enough people who will join it. Trump and MAGA has that, therefore Truth Social has some value and so too does DWAC.
Trials, juries, sexism, they all pale into entire insignificance on the money markets compared to that. Markets don't care, d'ye see?