DJT Stock Falls as Big Week Wraps for Trump Media

Trump Media & Technology Group stock was falling Thursday, the last trading day of a holiday-shortened week.

Trump Media shares were down 2.8% at $64.35.

The stock closed up 14% at $66.22 on Wednesday. That left the company valued at roughly $8 billion, making Donald Trump’s approximately 60% stake worth about $5.2 billion.

The former U.S. president is barred from selling Trump Media shares until a six-month lockup period expires, but he could seek a waiver from the company’s board, which includes one of his sons and several former members of his administration.

Trump Media reported revenue of $3.4 million and a loss of $49 million during the first nine months of 2023, and received a $300 million cash infusion as part of its listing via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle, or SPAC. The company operates the Truth Social platform which had five million mobile and desktop visits in February, according to data from the traffic analytics site Similarweb, making it a relatively niche social-media platform.

The company’s price-to-sales valuation far outstrips even the buzziest of its social-media peers such as Reddit and Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms. So far, no Wall Street analysts have put a rating or target price on Trump Media stock, according to FactSet.

If Trump Media is to go any way toward justifying its valuation on financial grounds—beyond the meme-stock style appeal of betting on Trump’s fame—then it will likely to need to go some way toward displacing Elon Musk’s microblogging platform X, which claims 550 million people visit the site monthly.

Truth Social’s format is very similar to that of X, and the two companies are now fighting for the same conservative audience. One of Musk’s first actions on acquiring Twitter was to reinstate Trump’s account and during his period of ownership, Republican senators have sharply increased their audience on X while Democrat senators have lost followers, according to an analysis by The Economist. The highest profile content creator on X is arguably Tucker Carlson, who launched his show on the platform after splitting with Fox News.

While Musk hasn’t directly commented on the public listing of Trump Media, he did say overnight on Wednesday that X accounts with more than 2,500 verified subscriber followers would get premium-tier features free, as he seeks to build its base of content creators who can attract more users.

Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]