Trump’s $8 billion media company creates a complex set of potential conflicts for the incoming president

Their most famous competitor—Fox News—is conspicuously absent. 

• Fortune’s series on Trump Media & Technology Group
• The company building Trump Media’s tech has historic links to Iran, Russia, and China
• Trump’s $8 billion media company creates a complex set of potential conflicts for the incoming president
• Real America’s Voice: How a tiny pro-Trump news network founded by a convicted criminal got so close to the president
• Trump Media is quietly storing at least one of its data centers in a facility owned by a longtime Republican donor and media mogul
• Trump Media lockup deadline leaves Trump with a choice: trigger a fire sale or hold a meme stock

TMTG’s ownership of Truth+ puts it at an unusual intersection of politics, business, and media. Trump is the majority shareholder of TMTG, though he has no formal role at the company. With a market cap of $7.6 billion, Trump’s $4 billion stake accounts for about two-thirds of the incoming president’s $6.4 billion personal net worth, according to Forbes.

Many of Trump’s political allies—lawyers, surrogates, and advisors—are now hosts on shows carried by Truth+. At least a dozen of them are currently employed by, or have content distributed by, broadcasters on Truth+ or TMTG itself. Trump is also the subject of the lion’s share of coverage on the outlets distributed on Truth+.

In fact, the overlap between Trump’s political network, his media business, and his personal wealth presents an array of potential conflicts for the incoming president. There are no laws obligating a president to divest their business interests when in office, only a series of norms that Trump already shunned in his first term, according to Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. During his first term in office, Trump placed his business assets in a trust managed by his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The move transferred control but not ownership of those assets, Painter said.

“Recent presidents other than Trump have avoided financial conflicts of interest with their official duties,” Painter said. “Trump is the only one who held on with his hotels and the golf courses and with businesses all over the world in 2016. I don’t see why it’s going to be any different now. It’s just that he]s getting into new businesses.”

Here is how Trump’s new social media business connects with his political and business interests:

(Neither TMTG nor any of the individuals mentioned in this article, with the exception of Mike Lindell, responded to requests for comment). 

Robert Sigg – Founder of Performance One Media, parent company of Real America’s Voice and WeatherNation

Sigg’s Colorado-based Performance One Media owns and operates the right-wing news channel Real America’s Voice (RAV). Currently less well-known than Newsmax or OANN, it aims to become a genuine competitor. RAV’s lineup was bolstered when it secured the distribution rights to Steve Bannon’s War Room talk show, which airs live for hours at a time on the channel. 

Performance One started building its roster of networks when Sigg wrested control of WeatherNation from its original founder, Minnesota weatherman Paul Douglas. In 2014, Performance One sued its client WeatherNation for $1.2 million in unpaid consulting fees. Two months later Performance One dropped the suit, and the network changed hands. The exact details of the agreement were never made public.

By 2016, Sigg had set his sights on getting into the news business, a former employee told Fortune. The news channel launched two years later in 2018 under the name America’s Voice News. Sigg decided to rename the network Real America’s Voice after a 2020 meeting with Trump, in which the then-president opined the original name sounded too much like Voice of America, the federally funded international broadcaster, Bannon told the Washington Post in 2022. 

Before his career as a media impresario, Sigg faced repeated legal problems. In 2006 he was convicted of mortgage fraud in a federal case. He has also been arrested in Colorado for assault, harassment, drug possession, driving under the influence, domestic violence, and burglary. Representatives for Performance One Media did not respond to requests for comment. 

Robert Herring Sr. – Founder of Herring Networks, parent company of One America News Network

Herring founded One America News Network in 2013 on advice from AT&T executives who told him the cable business needed another competitor to Fox News, according to comments he made in a 2019 deposition about a labor dispute with a former employee. In the 11 years since, the channel has gone further to the right than Fox News, delving deeper and with greater vehemence into conspiracy theories ranging from COVID-19 denialism to claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. In April, OANN ended up settling a defamation lawsuit with voting technology company Smartmatic over fraud claims the network made about the election. 

Herring made his fortune in the circuit board industry. He sold two factories, the first in 1988 for $52 million to Japanese firm Toppan West and the second in 2000 to Teradyne in an all-stock deal. When Teradyne’s stock price plummeted as a result of the dotcom bubble bursting, reducing the value of his shares, Herring sued, alleging he’d been misled about the company’s future. When he lost, Herring sued his lawyers for mishandling the case. He lost that case as well. That combative and litigious approach to business helped Herring find a kindred spirit in Trump. “There’s almost nothing you can mention that I don’t agree with him on,” Herring said in a 2021 interview with Reuters.

But despite Herring’s fondness for Trump he founded OANN, “to make money, number one,” he said in 2019.

Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images

Kash Patel – TMTG board member and FBI director designate

Trump’s decision to nominate Patel as FBI director in his incoming administration launched him into the upper echelon of American politics after a career as a government lawyer in Washington.

Patel has developed a reputation as a consummate Trump loyalist. That allegiance earned Patel powerful positions that are close to Trump in both politics and business. Patel has been on the board of TMTG since April 2022, a role which earns him $120,000 a year, according to SEC filings. (TMTG did not respond to a request for comment about whether Patel would resign if he were confirmed as FBI director.) As a TMTG director, Patel led an internal investigation into TMTG’s two cofounders, Wes Moss and Andrew Litinsky, over their alleged mishandling of the company’s IPO. That report served as the basis for an unsuccessful lawsuit in which the company sought to deny Moss and Litinsky the shares they were entitled to as cofounders of the company.

During the first Trump administration Patel worked at the National Security Council as senior director for counterterrorism. Prior to that he was a senior advisor to former California congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, who is now TMTG CEO. In that role Patel impressed Trump by authoring the “Nunes memo,” which served as the foundation for Republican efforts to undermine the 2017 Mueller investigation.

When Trump was facing his first impeachment—for asking Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden in exchange for military aid—he considered having Patel vet all White House aides for loyalty. “He wanted to make Kash a political executioner,” former Trump deputy national security advisor Charles Kupperman told the New York Times in October. 

Linda McMahon – TMTG board member and secretary of education designate

McMahon has known Trump since at least the late 1980s when the president-elect hosted two WrestleMania events at his Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. In 2007, Trump participated in WWE’s “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline, in which he floored WWE founder Vince McMahon ringside in apparent protest at the quality of refereeing in a bout between Bobby Lashley and Umaga. Linda McMahon was president and CEO of the wrestling company at the time. Her relationship with Trump crossed from business to politics during his first term, when she served as the head of the Small Business Administration. During the most recent election campaign, McMahon was named co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team alongside Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary designate. In November, Trump nominated McMahon to be secretary of education. Since Trump entered politics in 2015, McMahon has been among his most reliable donors. McMahon donated tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s various campaigns, including $10 million to a single PAC in 2024.

Devin Nunes – TMTG CEO and board member, former Republican representative from California’s 22nd Congressional District

Once one of the most conservative members of Congress, Nunes resigned from his seat in 2021 to become CEO of TMTG. During his time in office he was a vociferous and pugnacious defendant of Trump. As chair of the House Intelligence Committee he actively opposed the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign. Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in part for defending him in Congress, in a closed-door ceremony two days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, a move which brought derision from his opponents. Since becoming TMTG CEO, Nunes has led the company’s expansion of its technology infrastructure and explored deals with crypto companies. So far his stewardship has yielded only modest financial results: The company brought in just $2.6 million in revenue and lost $363.2 million through the third quarter of 2024. 

Mike Lindell – CEO and founder of FrankSpeech Network

The MyPillow CEO rose to national prominence for his impassioned support of election fraud conspiracy theories around the 2020 election. About a week after Jan. 6, 2021, Lindell reportedly met with Trump in the White House where he was pictured holding documents outlining a plan to install Patel as CIA director. Lindell told Fortune he was given those papers by a lawyer in the White House and “never read them.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic sued Lindell over his claims. Both suits are still ongoing. Lindell said he was confident the case would go in his favor. “It’s a wonder they haven’t just dropped it and said, ‘Here, Mike, we’re going to pay you for everything, we tried to destroy you,’” Lindell said in a phone interview.

While Lindell may be an avid Trump supporter, he could also be considered his competitor in alternative media targeted at conservatives. Lindell founded the FrankSpeech Network, a right-wing social media and streaming platform similar to Truth Social. Currently FrankSpeech operates as a rudimentary video player that mixes live and on-demand programming and a stand-alone social media app called FrankSocial. The two companies are partners, with Lindell’s nascent media company broadcasting its content on Truth+. Lindell denied there was any competition between FrankSpeech and TMTG. “There’s so much room in this space where the public needs to get, they need to get different alternatives,” he said.

Adam Gray—AFP/Getty Images

Steve Bannon – former White House senior advisor and host of the War Room

After Bannon’s online show War Room was booted from YouTube it got picked up by Sigg’s Real America’s Voice. “They get it out everywhere,” Bannon told the Washington Post in January 2022 of his deal with Sigg’s company. 

Now, Bannon’s program can be found for at least three hours a day on Truth+ and Truth Social through the platform’s content deal with Sigg’s Real America’s Voice.

Bannon was a key architect of Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016. In October, Bannon was released from federal prison after serving a four-month sentence for two counts of contempt of Congress: for refusing to sit for a deposition and provide documents to the House Jan. 6 Committee.

Mike Flynn – former Trump national security advisor and host of Patriot.TV 

The retired lieutenant general and former Trump national security advisor remains a fixture of the American right. On Patriot.TV, Flynn streams his talk show Inside the SCIF, where he sits in front of a green screen of the U.S. Constitution. Flynn was one of the first establishment figures to endorse Trump during his first presidential run. However, his tenure as national security advisor lasted only 22 days when he was forced to resign after it became apparent he had lied to the FBI about communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, which Trump pardoned him for in November 2020. 

In recent years Flynn has created a cottage industry of election conspiracy theories, including a speaking tour, a documentary, and a nonprofit that collected $21 million in donations through October of this year. When asked during a deposition in a lawsuit brought by a Dominion Voting Systems executive if he’d seen any “credible evidence” the company had rigged the election, Flynn replied, “No, I don’t really know.” When pressed, he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself.

Mark Schaftlein – CEO, Conservative Broadcast Media & Journalism, parent company of Patriot.TV

At CBMJ, Schaftlein pulls double duty as the company’s chief executive and the host of its flagship show, The Schaftlein Report. A former banker at Citigroup, he later started a private equity firm, Capital Consulting, and several media businesses. Through two acquisitions of small, right-wing media startups, Schaftlein has quietly expanded CBMJ’s roster of online media assets. While CBMJ’s content lineup doesn’t feature as many household names as some of its competitors, it has recruited one notable conservative figure to the boardroom—Floyd Brown. 

Brown was a longtime Republican media consultant, best known for creating the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential race that was widely considered to have cost Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis the election by playing on the racial fears of white Americans. He is also a founder of Citizens United, of the eponymous Supreme Court case. That case overhauled American campaign finance rules, allowing corporations and political action committees to spend unlimited amounts of money during elections.