Sci-Tech

How Pastor Chad Nedohin Helped Turn Trump Media Into a Meme Stock

Published

2 weeks ago

April 27, 2024

David Yaffe-Bellany and Matthew Goldstein

One afternoon last month, Chad Nedohin, a part-time pastor and die-hard supporter of Donald J. Trump, put on a pirate costume, set up his microphone and recited a prayer.

Mr. Nedohin was opening his latest livestream on the right-wing video site Rumble, where he has about 1,400 followers who share a devotion to Trump Media & Technology Group, the former president’s social media company.

“Faith comes from hearing — that is, hearing the good news about Christ,” said Mr. Nedohin, 40, his face framed by fake dreadlocks under a pirate-style hat.

Mr. Nedohin and his viewers were waiting for the results of a merger vote that would determine whether Mr. Trump’s company could start selling stock on Wall Street. Soon the news about Trump Media arrived via an audio feed: It was going public.

Mr. Nedohin raised his arms in celebration. A few minutes later, he cut to a video of a rocket blasting into the sky, with Mr. Trump photoshopped onto it. “We are holding Trump stocks,” he declared. “We are now financial investors in him.”

Mr. Nedohin is one of hundreds of thousands of amateur investors who own shares of Trump Media, convinced that its sole platform, Truth Social, will become one of the world’s most popular and profitable social media sites. In recent months, tens of thousands of Trump fans have tuned into Mr. Nedohin’s webcasts, where he exhorts viewers to invest in the company, arguing that “Trump always wins in the long run.”

The enthusiasm from Mr. Nedohin and other Trump supporters has turned Trump Media into the latest “meme stock,” driven more by internet hype than business fundamentals. In the public markets, these amateur investors have found themselves pitted against professional short sellers, specialist investors who bet that stocks will fail, as well as frantic day traders looking for a quick profit.

As a result, Trump Media’s stock price has swung wildly, sometimes dropping as much as 18 percent or rising as much as 28 percent in a single day. The company is “a meme stock on steroids,” one analyst recently wrote.

The stock’s unpredictable swings have major implications for Mr. Trump’s finances. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee owns more than $4 billion in Trump Media shares, including recently awarded bonus shares — a potential lifeline as he faces steep legal bills tied to the cases against him. The stock’s volatility could add hundreds of millions of dollars to his paper wealth — or vaporize it.

A Canadian citizen, Mr. Nedohin cannot vote for Mr. Trump in November. But he owns more than 1,000 shares in Trump Media, which are trading at about $36, down roughly 50 percent from its peak in March.

Mr. Nedohin began buying the shares in late 2021, after Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a publicly traded shell company, announced plans to merge with Trump Media. Digital World was trading at $93 a share at the time.

Once the merger was final on March 25, Trump Media began trading on Wall Street, and the original Digital World shares were converted into Trump Media stock under the ticker DJT.

Mr. Nedohin said he had held on to his shares and didn’t plan to sell. On the livestream, he interacts with viewers who use screen names like GOATPOTUS, urging them to keep the faith even when prices fall. “Don’t freak out,” he said on a recent show.

Truth Social “has the potential to easily eclipse Twitter,” the app now known as X, Mr. Nedohin said in an interview. “I’m not concerned about my investment whatsoever.”

Mr. Nedohin doesn’t like the term “meme stock” and prefers “populist retail investment.” But if he’s wrong about his bet, the financial impact on his viewers and Trump Media’s other investors could be devastating, given the risks of these volatile stocks.

By traditional metrics, Trump Media is not a successful business. The company reported $4 million in revenue last year and $58 million in losses. Compared with mainstream social sites, Truth Social has a minuscule audience — 1.5 million people visited the site last month, according to data from Similarweb, a small fraction of the 75 million who logged on to X.

Still, loyal investors like Mr. Nedohin are one reason Trump Media’s stock now trades at a valuation roughly equivalent to that of established companies like Wendy’s and Western Union. This month, Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s chief executive and a former Republican congressman, cited the enthusiasm of retail investors as a sign of the company’s strength.

Any suggestion that those traders might lose money amounts to “punching down at hundreds of thousands of everyday American retail investors,” Shannon Devine, a Trump Media spokeswoman, said in an email.

From his home in Edmonton, Alberta, Mr. Nedohin works as an engineer, calculating mechanical stress on pipes. But his passion is ministry: Although not ordained, he said, he has taken part-time gigs at local churches, leading worship groups as a nondenominational lay pastor. He’s also a guitarist, with a portfolio of original Christian songs, some of which have played on Canadian radio.

Before Truth Social, he said, he sometimes posted on Facebook but never got much traction. He craved an alternative.

In 2021, Mr. Trump co-founded Trump Media after he was kicked off Twitter for his incendiary posts before the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. A year later, Truth Social went live, managed by two former contestants on “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Nedohin had been a fan ever since Mr. Trump glided down the escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan to announce his 2016 campaign. He considers the former president a supporter of Christian values, and believes the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Mr. Nedohin created a Truth Social account in May 2022 and soon found a community that shared his two main interests: Christianity and Digital World’s stock.

“I’ve never met such an amazing group of people who are so happy to have freedom of speech,” he said.

But Truth Social was glitchy, and Mr. Trump took months to post his first message. In 2022, the two “Apprentice” contestants left Trump Media after the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the Digital World merger.

That inquiry delayed Trump Media’s plans to go public, and the price of Digital World’s stock dropped. Mr. Nedohin was concerned. But in the spring of 2022, he said, he received a message from God.

“You ask him to move a mountain, and sometimes he hands you a shovel,” Mr. Nedohin said. This time, he said, “that little voice inside” told him to start a podcast.

Mr. Nedohin started the Rumble show, “DWAC’d Live!” — a reference to Digital World’s stock symbol. On the show, he tried to mobilize Truth Social’s users, urging them to send letters to Congress protesting the S.E.C.’s investigation.

He adopted the pirate persona to drive attention, he said, calling himself “Captain DWAC” on the livestream. On Truth Social, he emerged as what passes for an influencer, with 6,600 followers.

Mr. Nedohin’s advocacy got the attention of Eric Swider, a Trump Media board member and former Digital World chief executive, who appeared on “DWAC’d Live!” last year.

“Make sure that you help get the word out there,” Mr. Swider said on the show, adding that “we’re very, very grateful for your assistance.”

In July, Digital World settled with the S.E.C. for $18 million, paving the way for the merger with Trump Media to be approved last month. Mr. Nedohin was ecstatic.

But the drop in Trump Media’s share price has caused consternation online, with some Truth Social users complaining that they have lost money. Much of the frustration has been directed at short sellers.

Trump Media posted instructions for shareholders on its website explaining how to prevent brokerage firms from lending shares to short sellers. Last week, Mr. Nunes wrote a letter to the Nasdaq, where the stock is listed, complaining about “potential market manipulation.” He followed that up with letters on Tuesday to the Republican chairs of several congressional committees. Mr. Trump previously warned that short sellers could “get hurt very badly.”

“As a Christian, I don’t believe in shorting,” Mr. Nedohin said. “I believe in only building for the positive.”

He remains fully committed to Truth Social. During the S.E.C. protest, he said, he returned to X, hoping to raise awareness about the campaign. Now that Trump Media is a public company, “I will never need to reach any of the people that are on there,” he said.

As his livestream ended, Mr. Nedohin deleted his X account.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

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Sci-Tech

Ros Atkins on… How different countries protect children online

Published

8 hours ago

May 11, 2024

worlddailyinfo

This week, the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, set out new rules for social media companies – aimed at protecting children from harmful content online.

More than 40 measures have been set out – including making firms change their algorithms and perform more rigorous age checks.

Around the world, governments are considering – or have already passed – similar legislation. Analysis editor Ros Atkins looks at what other countries are doing to try and protect children online.

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Sci-Tech

Test-at-home kit for cancer patients approved for use

Published

17 hours ago

May 10, 2024

By Shiona McCallum

Patients say the device allows them to reduce the number of hospital visits involved in cancer care.

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Sci-Tech

Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors

Published

17 hours ago

May 10, 2024

Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz

Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.

The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.

Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri had been limited for years to individual requests and had never been able to follow a conversation. It often misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked for the weather in San Francisco and then said, “What about New York?” that user wanted another forecast.

The realization that new technology had leapfrogged Siri set in motion the tech giant’s most significant reorganization in more than a decade. Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives.

Apple is expected to show off its A.I. work at its annual developers conference on June 10 when it releases an improved Siri that is more conversational and versatile, according to three people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. Siri’s underlying technology will include a new generative A.I. system that will allow it to chat rather than respond to questions one at a time.

The update to Siri is at the forefront of a broader effort to embrace generative A.I. across Apple’s business. The company is also increasing the memory in this year’s iPhones to support its new Siri capabilities. And it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple executives worry that new A.I. technology threatens the company’s dominance of the global smartphone market because it has the potential to become the primary operating system, displacing the iPhone’s iOS software, said two people familiar with the thinking of Apple’s leadership, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. This new technology could also create an ecosystem of A.I. apps, known as agents, that can order Ubers or make calendar appointments, undermining Apple’s App Store, which generates about $24 billion in annual sales.

Apple also fears that if it fails to develop its own A.I. system, the iPhone could become a “dumb brick” compared with other technology. While it is unclear how many people regularly use Siri, the iPhone currently takes 85 percent of global smartphone profits and generates more than $200 billion in sales.

That sense of urgency contributed to Apple’s decision to cancel its other big bet — a $10 billion project to develop a self-driving car — and reassign hundreds of engineers to work on A.I.

Apple has also explored creating servers that are powered by its iPhone and Mac processors, two of these people said. Doing so could help Apple save money and create consistency between the tools used for processes in the cloud and on its devices.

Rather than compete directly with ChatGPT by releasing a chatbot that does things like write poetry, the three people familiar with its work said, Apple has focused on making Siri better at handling tasks that it already does, including setting timers, creating calendar appointments and adding items to a grocery list. It also would be able to summarize text messages.

Apple plans to bill the improved Siri as more private than rival A.I. services because it will process requests on iPhones rather than remotely in data centers. The strategy will also save money. OpenAI spends about 12 cents for about 1,000 words that ChatGPT generates because of cloud computing costs.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

But Apple faces risks by relying on a smaller A.I. system housed on iPhones rather than a larger one stored in a data center. Research has found that smaller A.I. systems could be more likely to make errors, known as hallucinations, than larger ones.

“It’s always been the Siri vision to have a conversational interface that understands language and context, but it’s a hard problem,” said Tom Gruber, a co-founder of Siri who worked at Apple until 2018. “Now that the technology has changed, it should be possible to do a much better job of that. So long as it’s not a one-size-fits-all effort to answer anything, then they should be able to avoid trouble.”

Apple has several advantages in the A.I. race, including more than two billion devices in use around the world where it can distribute A.I. products. It also has a leading semiconductor team that has been making sophisticated chips capable of powering A.I. tasks like facial recognition.

But for the past decade, Apple has struggled to develop a comprehensive A.I. strategy, and Siri has not had major improvements since its introduction. The assistant’s struggles blunted the appeal of the company’s HomePod smart speaker because it couldn’t consistently perform simple tasks like fulfilling a song request.

The Siri team has failed to get the kind of attention and resources that went to other groups inside Apple, said John Burkey, who worked on Siri for two years before founding a generative A.I. platform, Brighten.ai. The company’s divisions, such as software and hardware, operate independently of one another and share limited information. But A.I. needs to be threaded through products to succeed.

“It’s not in Apple’s DNA,” Mr. Burkey said. “It’s a blind spot.”

Apple has also struggled to recruit and retain leading A.I. researchers. Over the years, it has acquired A.I. companies led by leaders in the field, but they all left after a few years.

The reasons for their departures vary, but one factor is Apple’s secrecy. The company publishes fewer papers on its A.I. work than Google, Meta and Microsoft, and it doesn’t participate in conferences in the same way that its rivals do.

“Research scientists say: ‘What are my other options? Can I go back into academia? Can I go to a research institute, some place where I can work a bit more in the open?’” said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a leading A.I. researcher, who left Apple in 2020 to return to Carnegie Mellon University.

In recent months, Apple has increased the number of A.I. papers it has published. But prominent A.I. researchers have questioned the value of the papers, saying they are more about creating the impression of meaningful work than providing examples of what Apple may bring to market.

Tsu-Jui Fu, an Apple intern and A.I. doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote one of Apple’s recent A.I. papers. He spent last summer developing a system for editing photos with written commands rather than Photoshop tools. He said that Apple supported the project by providing him with the necessary G.P.U.s to train the system, but that he had no interaction with the A.I. team working on Apple products.

Though he said he had interviewed for full-time jobs at Adobe and Nvidia, he plans to return to Apple after he graduates because he thinks he can make a bigger difference there.

“A.I. product and research is emerging in Apple, but most companies are very mature,” Mr. Fu said in an interview with The Times. “At Apple, I can have more room to lead a project instead of just being a member of a team doing something.”

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