Is Truth Social another of Trump’s bungled businesses?

It takes a brave investor to go into business with Donald Trump.

The former president’s hotels and casinos have declared bankruptcy six times. Trump’s short-lived airline crashed. He paid out millions of dollars to settle multiple lawsuits for running an unlicensed “university” that the conservative National Review called a “massive scam”. And then there is the Trump Organization’s looming criminal trial for tax fraud.

For all that, a business built around Trump’s famed ability to rile up millions of people online must have seemed a good bet to those who poured money into backing the company behind his rival to Twitter, Truth Social.

Now that too has run into trouble as more than a billion dollars in investment has stalled amid shareholder hesitation and a federal investigation into whether Trump Media and Technology Group broke the law in its dealings with a company set up to provide the money.