Donald Trump's newly public social-media company is not the next Nvidia — or Meta or Google or whatever has happened with X/Twitter.
The share price of Trump Media and Technology Group, trading under the stock ticker DJT (because of course it is), surged following the completion of its SPAC merger last week. A SPAC, or a special-purpose acquisition company, is a shell company — in this case, Digital World Acquisition — that goes public with the intention of buying an actual company later. For a while, TMTG's market cap was in the $9 billion range, making it more valuable than Etsy and Hasbro. That bumped up the former president's net worth to $7 billion, though not in a way he can immediately take advantage of. Unless the company's board says otherwise, Trump can't sell his shares for six months.
If I were Trump, though, I would cajole the board to speed up that lockup period so I could cash in. It seems, let's say, unlikely that his media company's stock price is going to stay so high forever. (It seems like investors agree — on Monday, after this story was first published, the stock tumbled by more than 25%.)
For one thing, TMTG, which owns the conservative Twitter copycat Truth Social, makes basically nothing. According to a new financial filing from the company released on Monday, its total revenue was $4.1 million in 2023. Extrapolate that out, and the stock is trading at something like 2,000 times the company's annual revenue. That is, um, high. Apple, for example, trades at about seven times its total revenue. And given TMTG's paltry revenue, it actually lost $58 million last year.
Trump's company says it has bigger plans ahead, such as growing Truth Social and developing "one or more additional cutting-edge products and/or services" to complement Truth, including some sort of video-streaming situation that "provides a 'home' for cancelled content creators." What exactly this might look like, or how many people would flock to it, isn't clear.
Truth Social had an estimated 5 million monthly website visits in February of this year, according to third-party trackers, but the company isn't revealing exact metrics right now. By comparison, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users when it went public in 2012, and Twitter had 215 million when it IPO'd the following year. The long and the short of it is that TMTG is not a thriving business.
But maybe other social-media outlets, which are designed to appeal to the widest possible base, aren't the right comparison. Truth Social and any other business Trump Media and Technology Group spins up is pretty much guaranteed to appeal just to Trump fans.