Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump does everything bigger than anyone outside of Texas. This includes his media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns his boutique social media app Truth Social. Last year, it lost an impressive $400 million on revenue of $3.6 million. This is a worse performance than in 2023, when the company lost $58 million on revenue of $4.1 million. It is not easy to lose that much money on a company that consists of a few servers and some technicians to run them. The report said that the losses resulted from a revenue sharing arrangement with an undisclosed advertising partner.
Trump, the most popular user on Truth Social, has 9 million followers. By way of contrast, Elon Musk has 101 million followers on eX-Twitter. Only one of them is happy about this score.
CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman, explained the performance: "After going public and listing on NASDAQ less than a year ago, TMTG developed quickly in 2024, and this year we aim to continue growing all our platforms." Aha! That explains how they lost $400 million. How does it survive like this? When it went public, people paid to buy the stock. The company still has $776.8 million in the bank, but at this burn rate, that won't last 2 more years.
After winning the election, Trump's shares in the company were worth about $4 billion on paper. He owns more than half the stock. It closed on Friday at $30.39, which puts the capitalized value at $6.5 billion. This makes it more valuable than companies like U.S. Cellular, Whirlpool, Abercrombie & Fitch, Sunoco, and Shake Shack, to name just a few well-known actual companies. Economists who believe markets price stocks rationally, based on current or expected future earnings, might have some explanation for this valuation, but we don't—at least not one using any definition of "rational" we are aware of.
The company is planning to get into the crypto business and has filed for a trademark on the name "TruthFi." It plans to integrate TruthFi into the social media site to allow Truth to scam Trump's followers out of their money with a simple click of a button. Note this is separate from Trump's other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which is also hemorrhaging funds. It is also separate from the $TRUMP coin. The Donald is a genius at thinking of new ways to separate his supporters from their money. But not all the credit is due Trump himself. He said that he was influenced by his youngest son, Barron, who showed him his [Barron's] crypto wallet. A financial dynasty in the making?