SPACs, one of the more odious products that Wall Street has ever devised, are making an unlikely comeback. SPAC Insider reports that there have been 44 SPAC I.P.O.s so far in 2025, compared to 57 in all of 2024, and 31 in 2023. (The FT commemorated the revival with their own ditty.) That’s peanuts compared to the 613 SPACs that raised more than $162 billion during the hallucinatory days of 2021. But such is the SPAC comeback that the three geniuses behind what’s now Trump Media & Technology Group have formed a new Special Purpose Acquisition Company with the mellifluous name Renatus Tactical Acquisition Corp I, and filed to raise around $180 million in an I.P.O. The sponsors of the Renatus SPAC include Devin Nunes, the former congressman turned C.E.O. of Trump Media, who is now chairman of the Renatus board of directors. Other sponsors include Eric Swider, the Renatus C.E.O. and TMTG board member; and Alexander Cano, the Renatus chief operating officer, and a former executive of the SPAC that merged with TMTG, Digital World Acquisition Corp. Renatus intends to buy a private company in one of three industries: cryptocurrency and blockchain; data security; or “dual use technologies.” (The latter refers to technologies developed in the defense sector that can be deployed for civilian purposes as well.) In any event, Renatus makes clear that it can buy any company in any business line that wants to be bought by the SPAC. Great country we’ve got here.

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The SPAC renaissance, in many ways, reflects the vehicle’s promiscuous and quasi-lunatic origins. SPACs, of course, allow smart-aleck finance types (known in SPACworld as “sponsors”) to form an empty shell of a company, and then take that ghost company public on the sole promise that it will subsequently merge with a private company—thereby taking it public, too—within a two-year window. Investment banks love SPACs because they can collect fees for underwriting the I.P.O. of the empty shell, and then more fees for arranging the merger with the private company. Sponsors, for their part, love SPACs because they basically get stock in the entity for free, and then get a big stake in the company that it takes public. If the stock of the SPAC appreciates, and they can get out, they get very rich—or, usually, just richer. If the stock of the SPAC depreciates—which is usually the case—they lose very little, since they paid close to nothing for their stock. A lovely asymmetrical bet for the sponsors. If there is no merger within the two-year limit, there is a modicum of justice: The investors in the original SPAC get their money back, and the sponsors end up eating the underwriting fees. Some of the more infamous SPACs illustrate why they have become so discredited. Take the case of Virgin Galactic Holdings, Richard Branson’s space-travel company, which merged with the SPAC Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings. Hedosophia, you may recall, was the brainchild of Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook executive and V.C. and current co-host of the All In podcast. In 2019, before the SPAC craze reached its apex, Hedosophia went public at $10 a share (like nearly every SPAC). After the merger with Virgin Galactic, the stock traded as high as $1,118 a share, in June 2021—pretty much the zenith of the pandemic mania—making the company worth tens of billions. By then, Chamath was already long gone. He sold his entire personal stake in the company in March 2021 for around $213 million, which turned out to be more than than the current value of the entire company today. It now trades for $4.80 a share, and has a market value of less than $200 million. The investors who bought after Chamath sold got deep-fried. The most infamous SPAC, of course, is Digital World Acquisition Corp., which went public in September 2021 and later merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Trump’s Truth Social. TMTG, trading under the stock symbol DJT, has very little revenue and very big losses. But it still has a market value of $5.6 billion, and Trump’s stake in the company, which he basically got for free, is worth nearly $3 billion. The DJT stock has been on a roller-coaster ride since it went public at $10 a share, in October 2021, depending mostly on Trump’s whims and behavior. The stock traded as high as nearly $100 a share in March 2022, but is down nearly 50 percent in the last year. Presumably, Trump couldn’t be happier about all this. He hasn’t been able to cash out yet, but it’s likely to happen one of these days. Meanwhile, he’s transferred his stake in TMTG to a revocable trust.

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One of the more unusual new SPAC filings I came across involves Cohen Capital Markets, an affiliate of Cohen & Company Inc., a firm I confess I had never heard of (its head of SPAC investment banking is Brandon Sun, who used to work on SPACs at Deutsche Bank). Cohen Capital Markets is the lead underwriter on a SPAC known as MSM Frontier Capital Acquisition Corp., which is hoping to raise $225 million with the aim of buying a company in Africa that is involved in the oil, gas, power, or cement industries. The chief sponsors of the MSM Frontier SPAC are Muazzam Mairawani, who will be chairman of the board of the SPAC, and Babatope Adedara, who will be the C.E.O. They control 95 percent of the SPAC through their Quadriga Industries LLC. Coincidentally, about a month before registering with the S.E.C. for the MSM Frontier I.P.O. (but two months after the company incorporated in the Cayman Islands), one of Mairawani’s other companies, called MSM Group of Companies, signed an agreement with the Kebbi State government in northwest Nigeria to build a “state-of-the-art” cement plant that has promised to create some 45,000 direct and indirect jobs, “transforming the industrial landscape” of Kebbi. (A potential acquisition target for MSM Frontier? SPACs aren’t supposed to identify potential targets in advance of pulling off an I.P.O.) In any case, MSM Frontier filed to go public at the end of April, and might be ready to complete the I.P.O. sometime early this summer. One name that rang a bell was Jide Zeitlin, one of the smaller shareholders of MSM Frontier, with 200,000 shares, who will serve as an “independent” director of the MSM Frontier board, chairman of its audit committee, and member of the board’s compensation committee. Zeitlin is a former Goldman Sachs pre-I.P.O. partner, and a former C.E.O. of Tapestry, the publicly traded parent company of Coach and Kate Spade. (In July 2020, when Zeitlin resigned as C.E.O. of Tapestry, I wrote about the events leading up to his resignation for ProPublica. Nearly a year later, he sued me for defamation in New York State court, losing three times before giving up the litigation in January 2025.) Zeitlin tried his hand at the SPAC game once before, unsuccessfully, with an entity named Bleuacacia Ltd., where he teamed up with Lew Frankfort, a predecessor C.E.O. of Tapestry. That SPAC, which raised $240 million in November 2021—underwritten by the now-defunct Credit Suisse and Citigroup—was unable to find an acquisition target, and was liquidated in November 2024. If you countenance SPAC Research’s May 2 newsletter, the new wave of SPAC filings represents an “I.P.O. resurgence” after a “years-long malaise,” and is an “encouraging” sign of life in the market. The $2.7 billion raised in the SPAC market this April, they write, was the most since February 2022, with the S-1 SPAC filings “coming at a pace not seen in years,” totaling 54 issuers seeking to raise some $10 billion, with more than half of the issuers coming from repeat sponsors. One of those repeat sponsors is Michael Klein, the billionaire former Citigroup investment banker, who now has his own eponymous M&A advisory firm. On April 28, his Churchill Capital X filed an S-1 to raise $300 million to try to do what SPACs do, yet again. It’s his tenth SPAC. His ninth SPAC is still looking for an acquisition candidate, while SPACs five, six and seven have all been liquidated. You can’t make this stuff up. This is not investment advice, but caveat emptor, as ever.