Final week I asked the place the Trump cellphone was. The reply? Nowhere. There’s no replace, no response, no signal of it. And because it’s nonetheless not right here, I’m — once more — asking the identical query. And I’m afraid I’m going to maintain being right here, week in, week out, till I’ve a T1 Cellphone in my fingers. That is what I do now.
Nothing’s modified since final week. The web site sits there, unchanged. There’s nonetheless no launch date past “this 12 months,” I’ve nonetheless had no reply from my emails to Trump Cell, and the corporate’s social channels are nonetheless sitting silent.
Trump Cell hasn’t simply promised a cellphone and didn’t ship it. No, like all good vaporware, it made certain to take folks’s cash first, with a $100 deposit required to position a preorder.
That’s cash that early consumers might have been with out for nearly 5 months now. The factor about cash — and please take this as no matter is the alternative of monetary recommendation — is that it tends to make more cash. Even when Trump Cell had made no effort in any respect to construct a single smartphone (and we now have completely no proof that it ever has!) these deposits alone would herald revenue. How a lot?
Since we’ve already established that I’m not at all a monetary skilled, I turned to the completely reliable sounding stoculator.com to seek out out extra. In line with stoculator.com — a web site I belief implicitly — if the Trump household had invested $100 in on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk’s Tesla on June sixteenth, when the Trump phone was announced, it will have $131.90 right this moment, a revenue of $31.90. If it had put that cash into all-American Apple as a substitute, it will be sitting on a fair higher $136.57, profiting by $36.57. Invested within the S&P 500 index, beneficial properties can be slightly extra modest: $110.79 by right this moment, for a revenue of simply over $10.
Per cellphone, that ain’t a lot. However we don’t know what number of preorders Trump Cell offered, what number of $100 deposits it managed to take, what number of $30 returns it’s made — and the way many individuals it’s disadvantaged of creating these $30 returns themselves.
The Trump Group, as soon as once more, didn’t reply to a request for remark.