‘This Is Getting Depressing!’ Trump Media Investors Despairing After Stock Stumbles Post-Election — Top Insiders Cashing Out
Lynne Sladky/AP
Many investors in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, expected the stock to get a boost after former President Donald Trump won re-election — and it did.
The problem is that post-election bump was short-lived.
The stock, which trades as “DJT” on the Nasdaq exchange, hit its highest mark in recent months of $51.51 per share on Oct. 29, fell to $30.56 on Nov. 1, popped up a bit to $36.96 on Nov. 6 (the day after the election), and has bobbed up and down the past two weeks to land at $29.87 on Nov. 19.
Screenshot via Google Finance.
But even that October high in the 50-dollar range was still “far below the $66 they traded for when Trump Media first hit the stock market in March,” reported The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.
It was a dire situation for many investors, wrote Harwell in an article recounting reactions from supporters of the former and future president who had sunk staggering sums into the stock — some of them entangling their retirement savings:
John Viaud, a retiree in South Carolina, knew he was taking a big risk when he poured his pension money into the stock of his political icon’s social media company, Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group.
As its share price sank in the months before the election, he took to the company’s Truth Social platform to write, “This is getting depressing! I’ve lost $600,000. … C’mon Trump!”
But Viaud was hopeful a Trump electoral win would rocket the stock into the stratosphere, posting, “Come November all of us are going to be very rich!!!”
Part of the problem, reported Harwell, is that Truth Social is fundamentally intertwined with Trump’s own fortunes, but not necessarily in a way that could help close the gap between the company’s stagnant revenues and share price. Trump’s re-election created “an identity crisis that has undermined [the stock’s] worth” by not only paving the way for his restoration to other social media platforms, but also undermining the raison d’être for Truth Social existing at all.
As president, Trump “will probably be one of the least censored men on the planet, trailed almost everywhere by cameras, microphones and crowds,” wrote Harwell. He doesn’t really need Truth Social to be able to share his messages to the world. Trump’s audience of 8 million Truth Social followers is “dwarfed” by his follower count on other platforms, perhaps most notably the nearly 95 million he has on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, now renamed X after its takeover by Elon Musk, who promotes pro-Trump messages on his own algorithmically amplified account to his 200 million followers.
TMTG has sued the Post for defamation over its past reporting, accusing the paper of making errors regarding how it reported the company’s initial financing, and that suit is ongoing. Shannon Devine, a TMTG spokesperson, responded to a request for comment to Harwell’s article by calling the story “ridiculously tendentious.”
One key sign of looming troubles: the C-suite executive rats abandoned ship after the election.
According to the Post, CFO Phillip Juhan “sold nearly 400,000 shares as part of a trading plan adopted in August,” director Eric Swider “sold all 136,000 of his shares, though his advisory firm, Renatus, still holds a small stake,” and general counsel Scott Globe sold 15,000 shares. CNBC valued Juhan’s shares at nearly $12 million and the total sold by these three executives at more than $16 million.
TMTG “has a market capitalization of $6.3 billion despite reporting revenue of slightly more than just $1 million in the third quarter of this year,” according to CNBC. “The company, whose share price has dramatically fluctuated since the stock became publicly traded in late March, reported losses of $19.2 million for the quarter.”
