Monday was a very good day for Donald Trump’s pocketbook. Not only did a New York appellate court slash the $454 million bond he owed in his civil fraud lawsuit by more than 60 percent, but shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp., which merged with the former president’s Trump Media & Technology Group last week, jumped 30 percent. Trump’s net worth, in turn, surged to $6.5 billion, vaulting him for the first time to Bloomberg’s list of the 500 richest people in the world. Per the publication, it was “the single-greatest day on record for the former president’s wealth.”
High on the list of people to thank for Trump’s newfound—albeit temporary—financial haleness is Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier. Yass has found his name in the news quite a bit lately, all for Republican-politics-type reasons, and it looks as if he could even be primed to be the newest billionaire to take a high-level role in a possible Trump administration. It’s a radical reversal for a political megadonor who has long been known as a Never Trumper.
The Digital World Acquisition Corp. merger with Trump’s Truth Social had Yass’ fingerprints all over it. As the New York Times reported, “Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corp., which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday,” making it the single largest institutional shareholder of the company behind that merger. This means that—assuming Susquehanna still owns those shares—Yass’ firm is now one of the largest institutional shareholders of Trump’s social media company. (The financial boost for the former president, coming at a time of acute legal and financial distress, may prove temporary as the stock price goes down; also, Trump is currently prohibited from selling........