Donald Trump sued two former contestants on The Apprentice, his hit NBC reality show, who became co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group, claiming they failed to set up the venture properly and should not get promised stock worth more than $400m.
Trump fronted The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job at the Trump Organization, from 2004 to 2015. The show coined Trump’s catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, though he ended up fired himself, after entering Republican presidential politics and making racist comments about Mexicans.
Wesley Moss and Andrew Litinsky met as Apprentice contestants in 2004. In 2021, after Trump was thrown off major social media platforms for inciting the January 6 Capitol attack, as he sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, the two men pitched Trump on starting his own platform, which became Truth Social.
“This was a phenomenal opportunity for Moss and Litinsky,” said the suit filed by Trump in Florida in late March and first reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
Though the two men were “riding President Trump’s coattails”, the suit said, “all [they] needed to do was diligently, faithfully and loyally execute on a short-term plan: get TMTG’s corporate governance established, get Truth Social ready to launch, and find a suitable special purpose acquisition company to take the new company public and access capital to advance TMTG’s business plan”.
Trump Media’s path to market was anything but smooth – including, as the Guardian revealed on Wednesday, a 2022 rescue through emergency loans in part provided by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.
Last week, Trump Media finally debuted as a publicly traded stock, amid predictions it could boost Trump’s worth at a time of considerable financial stress, as he runs for president while fighting 88 criminal charges and paying multimillion-dollar bonds in civil cases.
As Bloomberg put it, however, Trump Media has proved to be a “hot but flailing meme stock”, valued in the billions but widely seen as extremely unstable. On Monday, after Trump Media was revealed to have lost $58.2m last year, the value of Trump’s stake in the company dropped by $1bn.
Trump’s lawsuit said Moss and Litinsky were due to receive 8.6m shares, which at Tuesday’s closing price would be worth about $444m.
But, the suit said, they “failed spectacularly at every turn” in setting up Trump Media, failing to establish corporate governance and making “a series of reckless and wasteful decisions” that damaged merger plans and put the project “on ice” for more than a year and a half.
Once Moss and Litinsky left the company, the suit said, they attempted to thwart its plans, including by filing their own lawsuit in Delaware, seeking their promised stake.
That suit was filed in February. In a hearing in the case on Monday, Bloomberg reported, the judge, Sam Glasscock III, professed himself “gobsmacked” to learn Trump had filed suit in Florida rather than make a counterclaim in Delaware.
Glasscock said he would consider sanctions against Trump.
