Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Lutnick: Rumble and Trump's 'Truth' Platform Have Distribution Deal

Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, whose firm-sponsored special acquisition company last week announced its agreement with the video platform Rumble to go public, said on Newsmax Monday that Rumble won't be a competitor with former President Donald Trump's planned Truth Social platform, but that the companies have a deal for distribution.

"Truth and the 45th president are going to use Rumble's infrastructure, their technology, their cloud distribution capability, so they are going to be a service provider, a tech provider to the president's Truth Social," Lutnick said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now."

Rumble, a video platform that is in direct competition with YouTube, has grown over the past year to encompass a 15% market share of U.S. users, said Lutnick, and specifically works as a neutral provider that does not censor users in the ways employed by other providers, like YouTube or Twitter.

Lutnick said he used the service himself recently in his announcement to his company's 12,000 employees about his recent diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"I feel strong," he told Newsmax host John Bachman, adding that he'll be finished with treatments by the end of January and that his doctor expects him to be "cancer-free."

Lutnick said the company's growth has shot up drastically since the third quarter of 2020 when it had about 1.6 million active users until now when it has grown to have 36 million active users.

"What this is, is people with political ideology being asked to leave YouTube, comedians are now coming over, gamers are coming over," said Lutnick. "It's a broad group of people don't want to be censored. They want to be able to speak their minds, speak their truths, and speak their opinions. So I think Rumble, which is neutral down the middle, I think it's going to get a huge following of people who just want to speak their minds."

CF Acquisition, the Canter Fitzgerald-started company which agreed to take Rumble public last week, jumped by 20% in premarket trading Monday, after it climbed about 13% last Friday after Lutnick initially confirmed that Truth Social will pay Rumble for distribution services, reports Seeking Alpha.

Lutnick told Newsmax Monday that with the agreement with the acquisitions company, Rumble will "have the money now to go do whatever they want to do," but Rumble's CEO is keeping control of the company and it's not selling out to anyone, so the firm will stay neutral.

"They're not selling out to anybody," Lutnick said. "They're going to keep their control and they're going to stay central."

Trump has an account on the site, after having been blocked from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, but that doesn't mean there's no room for former President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden, said Lutnick.

"[They would] like to have the 44th and 46th," he said. "The way you have to be is you have everybody on the network. You don't censor them. You let them speak, and you speak to each other. You know, the concept of just speaking to yourselves doesn't make any sense. You want to go where you can speak your mind. But I think Rumble is going to do incredibly massive, massive growth."

Lutnick also talked about the economy as a whole, saying that he does think the news about the omicron coronavirus variant will slow the economy a bit and will add "six-to-eight weeks to 'back-to-the-office' recovery."

"But I think the fact is that the economy is driven by the Fed, and I think if the Fed raises rates, there's only one reason for them to raise rates because they're going to be cut in again … and that concept of papering, it's going to hurt the economy," he said.

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