About six months ago, Will Wilkerson was the former president’s executive vice president of media business. Donald Trump and co-founder of the website Truth Social. Today he works as a barista at Starbucks, where he makes frappuccinos for $16 an hour.

“It’s an honest job,” he says, sitting outside a small flower stand in suburban North Carolina. “I love what I do.”

Will Wilkerson blew the whistle on Trump’s Truth Social. Now he works at Starbucks. He is a former senior Trump media executive who says he shared 150,000 internal documents with federal investigators https://t.co/3G4wDC3MJA. pic.twitter.com/EXk3Zicenr

— Andreas Harsono (@andreasharsono) April 29, 2023

Wilkerson, 38, became one of the biggest threats to the future of Trump’s media company when he became a protected whistleblower. Since then, he has provided 150,000 emails, contracts, and other documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission..

Wilkerson accused the Trump Media and Technology Group of providing misleading information to investors. Shortly thereafter, the company fired him, trying to discredit him but not responding to his allegations.

Over the next few months, he sent out hundreds of job applications, hoping to find something in technology or radio. In December, when he ran out of money and options, he turned to Starbucks. Although he listed his role as a Trump Media executive on his resume, he suggests that his experience as a barista at Whole Foods in Los Angeles got him his current job.

The Wilkerson case has received less media attention than the former president’s other pending lawsuits, the most recent involving payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

If the Securities and Exchange Commission decides that Trump’s company has misled investors, Wilkerson could receive millions of dollars in Rewards for Justice. Trump Media, which owns the Truth Social platform, was initially under criminal investigation in preparation for a possible merger with a blanched company called Digital World.

Last year, federal prosecutors launched an investigation into two loans totaling $8 million to Trump Media across the Caribbean from two unidentified entities that appear to be controlled in part through links to an ally of Vladimir Putin. A criminal investigation threatens to delay the completion of the Trump Media-Digital World merger, which would bring the company and Truth Social up to $1.3 billion in capital, as well as its IPO.

However, the former president and his allies say Social Truth is a big hit. Devin Nunez, a former congressman who is now the CEO of Truth Social, said in an interview this month that the site “undermines the status quo,” while Trump said, “As soon as I ‘speak’, SPEECH immediately goes everywhere. MAGA!

The truth is that the company that promised investors that it would reach 50 million users by 2024 has made very little progress towards that goal. Truth Social had 7 million traffic last month, while the Rumble website had 169 million visits in March and Twitter had 6.6 billion.

According to the Washington Post