The truth about Truth Social
The media company is basically a meme stock, but it's helping former President Trump accumulate wealth.
It’s been just over a month since Trump Media & Technology Group — ticker symbol DJT — started trading on the Nasdaq. The initial public offering has come with lawsuits, wild swings in the share price and potential windfalls for former President Donald Trump.
We recently learned from a regulatory filing that the company has issued around $1.5 billion worth of new shares of stock to Trump himself. As of Thursday, Trump Media had a valuation over $6.5 billion.
“Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio spoke with Kimberly Adams, our senior Washington correspondent, about the company’s latest moves.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: That valuation fluctuates with the stock price. But what do we know about what the pros call the “fundamentals,” under the hood of this company? How’s it doing?
Kimberly Adams: It depends on who you ask. Obviously, they say they’re doing great. Trump Media is the parent company of Truth Social, which is obviously the preferred platform for the former President Trump, but it’s not a very big platform. There are estimates that it just has about 5 million monthly visitors, compared to, say, 3 billion active users on Facebook.
Jay Ritter teaches finance at the University of Florida and is an expert on IPOs. And he says it’s hard to justify the current share price.
Jay Ritter: Its sources of revenue are paid subscribers and advertising revenue, and neither of them is growing. The indications are it’s actually losing subscribers, and its expenses are vastly in excess of the $4 million of revenue that it’s bringing in. So this is a small company that is not growing and is losing money hand over fist.
Adams: It’s basically a meme stock with the price being driven up by retail investors, often fans of the former president who see this as a way to support him.
Brancaccio: And why did DJT the Republican standard bearer get the additional shares, which will certainly help him in the personal wealth department?
Adams: Yeah, Trump is the majority stakeholder in the company, and he did just get an even bigger share of the company. So Trump Media went public by merging with a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company. And as part of that merger agreement, if the stock price stayed at about $17.50 for 20 consecutive trading days, which it did, Trump would get an extra 36 million shares in the company. That brings his total to 114 million, almost two-thirds of all the shares available. So here’s Jay Ritter at the University of Florida again.
Ritter: So the price has gone up, and the number of shares has gone up. And when you take these two things into account, his paper wealth has almost doubled in the last two weeks to $5 billion in this company.
Adams: But Trump can’t sell those shares until September unless he gets a waiver from the company’s board, which is likely since that’s made up of his family and inner circle. But it would need [Securities and Exchange Commission] approval. And Ritter says it’s going to be hard for Trump to convert all this to cash anytime soon. Of course, if the price of the stock goes down before Trump sells, which many short sellers are hoping it will, that would decrease how much the former president stands to make.