Donald Trump’s tiny social media empire revealed another heavy loss and a fall in sales in a surprise stock market filing as the first polls closed on the night of the presidential election.
Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) had staged a volatile rally in the final stages of the campaign, more than tripling in value in a matter of weeks, before losing ground. On the day of the election, Nasdaq halted trading of the company’s stock, which goes by the ticker symbol DJT, several times as its price rose and fell by huge percentages.
Truth Social, the company’s fledgling social network, remains minuscule in comparison to the likes of Meta’s Facebook or Instagram; TikTok; and Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. TMTG’s wider business is still losing money, too.
Net sales at TMTG fell almost 6% to $1m in the three months to 30 September, while net losses narrowed to $19.2m from $26m in the same period of last year. TMTG attributed the loss to legal fees, acquisition costs and research and development spending.
The firm’s meager financial returns have not prevented it from building an eye-watering $6.8bn valuation since its market debut earlier this year, leaving Trump’s majority stake worth almost $3.9bn on paper.
TMTG’s rally in the last stretch of the campaign coincided with an apparent swing towards Trump in the betting markets, where forecasts indicated the former president had a greater chance of Harris than winning. Its recent performance was outlined in a filing released on Tuesday evening; TMTG had not formally flagged to investors that it would be published on election day.
TMTG’s turbulent market rise has propelled it into the ranks of so-called “meme stocks”, such as the video games retailer GameStop, which have rattled Wall Street in recent years by staging unexpected, volatile rallies as day traders piled in.
After its earnings were released on Tuesday, shares in TMTG rose 6% during after-hours trading. Earlier in the day, they had surged by nearly 18% before falling into the red to finish down 1.2%.
The TMTG CEO, Devin Nunes, a Trump ally and former US representative, hailed an “extraordinary quarter” for the company and touted its “legion” of retail investors. The company had about 650,000 shareholders as of last month, it said. Roughly 1.4 million people used the social network every month as of March 2024, the analytics firm SimilarWeb reported.
Efforts to develop a streaming arm of the business “are not the end of our expansion but merely the beginning”, Nunes said, “as TMTG continues to explore additional possibilities for growth such as potential mergers and acquisitions with companies that would benefit from Trump Media technology and branding, including in the realm of fintech”.
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