Twitter inks President Trump to exclusive 7-year contract

During a Friday telephone interview, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confided that the popular social networking site has shored up their most popular user, US President Donald Trump, with an exclusive contract running through 2024.
According to Dorsey, the contract maintains that the President’s personal and professional communications via social networking will come exclusively through Twitter, although it allows that assistants may tweet through his account or summarize his words on other social networking sites that carry the President’s name and likeness.
The financial terms were not completely clear, although Dorsey stated that the contract will pay the President “about $6.5 million base per annum” for exclusive use of the website, with bonuses for Tweets exceeding twelve per day and other added content, leaving the total value of the contract indeterminable.
Dorsey replied to the obvious question — that the president has signed a financially lucrative commercial contract while serving in the nation’s highest office — by stating that specific lawyers had been brought in during the negotiation process to assure that the contract was legal and did not violate any existing law. Dorsey said that the laws were worked around in part by placing the money in an escrow-style account pending the president’s departure from office, after which he will be able to collect the full balance of the nearly $50 million base contract plus whatever bonuses President Trump might be able to accrue by posting added content.
“This was a tough contract because of the legal ramifications,” Dorsey maintained. “But it was something that we felt we needed to do. In spite of the constant calls for (Twitter) to remove the president’s account, he’s been really remarkable for our business and our product. Can you think of the last day that each and every news did not mention our product? I can assure you, it was before Donald Trump captured the nation’s attention. So it was tough, but we crossed the T’s, this is 100% legal for both Twitter and for the President. This should present no conflict of interest.”
The contract assures that the president will have access to his account — and the ears and eyes of the American people — through the end of his presidency.
“We’ll look into the same type of contract with the incoming president when President Trump leaves office in 2024,” Dorsey stated.
Twitter is currently listed as the 13th largest website in the world, and is valued at nearly $16 billion. The site peaked at $40 billion in value in 2013 but had shrunk to less than $10B as recently as February 2016.
“Twitter’s rebound has largely hinged around Trump’s larger-than-life presence,” Dorsey reported, pointing to a 2017 report that stated that the president was worth $2B in value to the site.
“$6M or $7M is a pretty small price to pay to protect that kind of value,” Dorsey stated, adding “and it’s probably for the best that we keep the president off of Instagram.”