The No. 2 executive at Donald Trump‘s social media company resigned this week. A report alleges the departure is connected to a whistleblower complaint. A few days before that, one of the company’s major shareholders announced they had sold their stake in the company.
At a normal company, this is the kind of news that might cause investors to bail. And indeed, shares in Trump Media & Technology Group — the company that runs Trump’s Truth Social platform — were down about 1% Friday morning. Then they bounced back, up around 3%, by noon.
So if you’re expecting DJT to crater in the near future, you’re making a mistake. It would mean you’re thinking about Trump Media & Technology Group as a typical company, instead of a meme stock.
We’ve done this many times, so briefly: Trump Media & Technology Group runs Truth Social, but Truth Social is embryonic at best. It has next-to-no revenue, and the revenue it does have is declining. In the first six months of this year, the company had net sales of $1.6 million, down from $2.3 million during the same period in 2023. We can’t tell you how many users it has, because the company won’t disclose that number and says it may not even know that number itself. The main asset the company once had was its exclusivity as the one place Trump was posting social media messages. But that’s no longer true, since he has once again started posting on the social service previously known as Twitter. Yet Trump Media is still worth some $3 billion.
Or, shorter: DJT is a meme stock.
It trades independently of any financial considerations. Shares have been slumping for much of the year, but many people believe that’s due to fears that Trump himself will dump shares or that his prospects for winning next month’s elections have gone down — or both things could be true. But it remains next to impossible to explain why DJT moves up or down on any given day: shares are up around 11% since Monday.
In any case, it is certainly worth reading ProPublica’s report connecting the recent departure of the company’s chief operating officer and chief product officer to an internal complaint alleging wrongdoing by CEO Devin Nunes.
I asked Trump Media for comment and it referred me to the statement it previously provided to ProPublica, which called its reporting the “fifth consecutive piece in an increasingly absurd campaign by ProPublica, likely at the behest of political interest groups, to damage TMTG based on false and defamatory allegations and vague innuendo.”
I’ve also asked Andrew Northwall, Trump Media’s former COO, for comment. In a post on Truth Social, Northwall said he resigned and is looking “forward to focusing more on my family and returning to my entrepreneurial journey, where my heart truly lies.”
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