A Glimpse At Devin Nunes’ Comp As CEO Of Trump’s TRUTH Social
Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is pulling a salary of $750,000 a year as CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind TRUTH Social, according to an SEC filing from last month.
The filing came not from TMTG, Trump’s company, but from Digital World Acquisition Corp. TMTG plans on going public by merging with Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Nunes’ base salary of $750,000 salary is a steep jump from the $174,000 he made as a congressman until he resigned his seat at the end of 2021. After two years on the job, Nunes is slated to get a raise to $1 million per year, per the filing.
The filing, which does not include a copy of Nunes’ employment agreement, offers a glimpse at the rest of Nunes’ compensation package. However, it lacks the details to piece together its total value.
Newsletters
Get TPM in your inbox, twice weekly.
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again. Your subscription has been successful.
A TMTG representative didn’t return TPM’s requests for comment and requests to review a copy of Nunes’ employment agreement. Nunes did not respond to attempts to reach him.
Nunes entered into the employment agreement with the Trump company on Dec. 6, 2021, the filing says. Nunes announced his plan to retire from Congress the same day. He resigned from Congress on Jan. 1 and began work at the Trump company on Jan. 2.
In addition to his base pay, Nunes is eligible to participate in any bonus plan the company has and will get an “initial incentive equity grant” of 145,000 restricted shares of TMTG’s common stock, subject to vesting over two years, the filing says.
I reached out to a few finance experts to get a better sense of what the stock grant means for Nunes.
Jay Ritter, a SPAC expert and professor of finance at the University of Florida, said that Nunes would be unable to access value in the shares until they vest and the merger goes through.
“That’s somewhere between $1.45 million and $7 million,” Ritter said, describing a range between the stock’s base price of $10 per share and Digital World’s current price of around $45 per share.
“But if the merger doesn’t go through the stock is going to be worthless,” Ritter said, adding that it would be up to TMTG to find another way of going public. “His incentives are aligned with Trump Media’s public stockholders.”
That may be pretty good news for Nunes. Even if the stock price, post-merger, plummets to $10 per share, that’s still a gain of $1.45 million for him. Not bad.
But others said that, at the moment, there’s nothing to suggest that Nunes has a stake in the juiciest part of the deal, the merger itself.
Richard Spurgin, a former investment analyst and finance professor at Clark University, told TPM that the “real money” in the deal lies in Digital World’s acquisition of equity in Trump World – that is, Trump selling TMTG to the SPAC for a cool $875 million.
It’s not clear that Nunes has been given any access to that part of the deal. Nunes’ shares will vest over the next two years, meaning he won’t be able to cash in on the value of the stock until then or at all if the merger fails to happen.
“I had expected his package to have more upside,” Spurgin said, noting that the specter of an ongoing SEC investigation could still tank the merger.
Nunes will also receive severance of “accrued obligations” plus six month’s worth of salary if he is terminated by the Company without cause or leaves for good reason, according the filing.
02
How Trump's War On Twitter Affects Social Media
The president is going after Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a statute laid in 1996 that laid the groundwork for the modern digital age. It gives social media companies almost all-authority to moderate content on their platforms without penalty.
To a large extent, Section 230 is the reason we can post freely on the internet, as tech companies are not liable for posts users put on their sites. As the White House said, they are like bulletin boards, distributors of the content but not publishers. Most tech companies only step in to regulate extreme content, like violence or nudity.
If the order is passed, Facebook, Twitter and other companies may lose their Section 230 protection if they limit user freedom of speech or deviate from the terms of service without a fair hearing. The White House wrote that these companies hold unprecedented power to shape the interpretation of public events, to control what people see and do not see. Selective censorship would harm national discourse and reflect political bias. It wrote: "Such debate is just as important online as it is in our universities, our town halls, and our homes. It is essential to sustaining our democracy."
03
Editorial: Every Trump crony who refuses to abide by subpoenas should face charges
Country
best social media Growing tool : https://rb.gy/o5zu4o