The shares of the social media company fell more than 21% on Monday, bringing former President Donald Trump‘s net worth down to around $1 billion. This marked the end of Trump Media’s mysterious rise.
Even with the sharp decline, his 57 percent ownership in the company is still valued at more than $3 billion.
The company, which started trading last month following a merger with a publicly traded shell, has profited from investors in so-called “meme stock” investments, which have raised the share price of the company in spite of its dismal financial results. According to public papers, the company lost $58.2 million in 2023 and only made $4.1 million in revenue.
On paper, the corporation is still valued at over $6 billion, even after the drop on Monday. Trump cannot yet sell his shares because of a six-month lock-up provision for important company executives, despite the fact that he is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in court judgements.
The primary offering from Trump Media is Truth Social, a competitor to Elon Musk’s platform X, which was once known as Twitter.
After being banned from Twitter for “posing a risk of further incitement of violence” in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump moved to Truth Social. According to the company’s records, Truth Social has signed up over 9 million people since its launch, although has issued a warning that its operations are not very sophisticated.
“Investors should be aware that since its inception, TMTG has not relied on any specific key performance metric to make business or operating decisions. Consequently, it has not been maintaining internal controls and procedures for periodically collecting such information, if any,” the filings said.
Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman, is the CEO of Trump Media. As part of its agreement to go public, the company received an inflow of more than $300 million in funding. The documents recognised that it might have gone out of business without that money.
Whether Trump Media can sustain its high share price long enough for the former president to profit is still to be seen. The New York Times reports that the most shorted stock on Wall Street right now is Trump Media.
