Donald Trump could get $1 billion stock bonus from struggling DJT stock

The stock DJT down in the dumps over the last week, it’s fallen nearly 20%, though it did close slightly in the green today. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social earlier, praising his own social media platform and ignoring the stocks losses he wrote. Quote, I’m so proud of Truth Social because I believe it represents the Make America Great Again movement and to quote and he’s encouraging his supporters here to support Truth. We don’t know if he meant the app or the stock, but of course Donald Trump is set to stand trial Monday in his criminal hush money case. Despite all that, he’s on track for a massive payday due to how much Trump media stock he owns. Let’s bring in MarketWatch columnist Brett Arens on this. He just wrote a new piece titled Cha Ching Trump on track for a billion dollar stock bonus while outside investors lose up to 50%. Brett, great to see you today. Oh, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Explain how it works. Like the stock is plummeting and he stands to make more than a billion dollars. How? I don’t know. I don’t know whether the stock is going to go up or go down. But one thing is certain, Donald Trump’s going to make a lot of money. The way it works, you have to read these prospectuses before you speculate on this stuff. The way it works is that there are the fine print in the in the prospectus says that Donald Trump will get a huge stock bonus. Current value is over $1 billion so long as essentially the stock, the average price of the stock stays above certain levels. Now the prices are so low, 12, fifty, $15 and 1750, that you have to think, well, there’s a very good chance you know he’ll stay above that even if the stock continues to slide. But it’s even better than that if you’re Donald Trump, because if the stock doesn’t have to stay above those levels, it just has to produce something called a volume weighted average price above those levels. What that actually means is because most of the trading volume in the stock was in the first few days it went public, and back then it was in the 60s and the 50s. That’s essentially what sets the the average price for the 1st 20 days. So the long and short is, it doesn’t matter if the stock halves from here or even falls 75% from here, Donald Trump is still basically guaranteed to get another 36 million shares of stock as a bonus. Now obviously the value of that is going to depend upon, you know, what the share price is. So if the share price falls, his bonus is worth less. However, it’s not going to stop him getting the bonus. But Brett, even if investors read every bit of fine print in that prospectus, many of them may still have wanted to invest because they were not investing because of the potential return. They were investing in the man and the brand and what he represents. Then buy a MAGA hat. Buy a MAGA hat. Buy AI understand the MAGA crowd have now got to survive till 25 cap going around they got all sorts of stuff. Buy a MAGA. Do you have any sense if if Donald Trump has 79 million shares of this company, do you have a a sense of how many outstanding shares are tradable? Yeah, there’s we think about 30 to 40 million shares are being traded. That was the estimate from Renaissance Capital which specializes in IPOs and their experts and all this stuff. They wreck, we don’t know exactly, but it’s about 30 to 40 million. So there’s a big chunk of of stock that is being traded. Actually the, I mean I don’t want to get too technical here, but actually there are warrants out there and if you really wanted to buy the stock, you’d actually get a better deal buying the warrants. But to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t buy either. You want to buy a MAGA hat? A MAGA hat. You want to buy $400.00 sneakers? Go and buy $400.00 sneakers. You can actually get Trump gold coins on the Internet, but I wouldn’t buy the stock. Or a Bible, a special Bible. If you want to look at the efforts that he’s making toward Truth Social when he posted about the stock today or the app, either one. Did you see movement in this in the share price? Yeah, but you know you you you can’t necessarily, I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from any short term movement in the course of one hour or one day he could post something, there could be a bump in the price and then it could go down again. The long the trend, I mean the stock has halved since the first day it basically became DJT. It was a shell company. Before that it was trading in the mid to high $60.00. It’s now 33. It was down to 29 at one point. I think actually his tweet helped bump it up above $30.00. But we have no way of valuing this. The thing if you, I mean, look, it’s a master class in salesmanship. He is a very good salesman and he’s extraordinarily good at marketing himself. He’s extraordinarily good at playing the media. I would like to say he plays them like a banjo, but that’s actually an insult to banjos. He plays the media like a triangle, the simplest, the simplest instrument in the in the orchestra. He’s exceptionally good at hustling, exceptionally good at marketing and Cheetos. It is basically PT Barnum. PT Barnum runs for president. Never give a sucker an even break.