As Truth Social Collapse Continues, Finance Professor Says Its Stock Is Still 1,000 Percent Overvalued
Blow Out
Despite losing most of its value, the stock price for Donald Trump's free-falling Truth Social platform may still be hugely overvalued.
In an interview with ABC News in the wake of the ex-president claiming he has no plans to sell his $1.7 billion stake in his anti-woke Twitter clone, which has reached a new all-time low around $13 per share this morning, University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter suggested the stock should in actuality be worth far, far less.
Having only brought in about $836,000 in revenue last quarter — down 30 percent from last year, which is not the trajectory you want to see in a startup — Ritter told the broadcaster that his calculations based on cash per share suggest the stock is still overvalued by a staggering 1,000 percent. (To be fair, it's not clear which particular snapshot of the stock's decline Ritter was talking about, so maybe after today's continued slide it's only due to fall another 800 or 900 percent.)
Despite already losing a whopping $4 billion in valuation, on paper the social network is still somehow valued at around $2.79 billion — a third of the more than $9 billion market cap it boasted when shares were at their highest following the company going public, but still nothing to scoff at.
"It’s grossly overvalued," Ritter told CNN earlier this month. "It’s hard to come up with a value of the company that is much more than the cash on the balance sheet."
Meme Queen
While Trump claims he's keeping most of his stake, the share value became lower than ever this week as he passed the insider trading ban deadline that could technically allow him to sell at any time.
As many have noted before, Truth Social is unusual not just because of the personality behind it, but also because of the way it operates as a passive indicator of investor-cum-voter confidence in the real estate mogul's presidential prospects.
"It's much more of a speculative half-proxy for the former president's reelection prospects, and half kind of a long shot early-stage opportunity to get in on a potential new tech company and social media platform," Tyler Richey, a Sevens Report Research analyst, told ABC.
Between reaching the sell-off date, his second brush with an attempted assassin, and the revelation of his crappy new family crypto venture, it's been a no-good very bad week for Truth Social and its infamous founder.
And with the way things are looking for his other big endeavor, it's increasingly hard to imagine many Truth Social investors coming out ahead in the long run.
More on Trump: As Its Stock Nosedives, Truth Social Sounds Like an Absolute Wreck Behind the Scenes