President Donald Trump’s media company said its third-quarter revenue tripled from the same time last year, driven largely by subscriptions, including the company’s sale of advance access to top Truth Social posts.
In an earnings call on Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, announced $3 million in revenue, including $1.8 million from subscriptions to the Truth+ streaming platform and Truth API, a service the company launched in August to provide instant access to Trump’s Truth Social posts that has faced legal questions.
The earnings report comes ahead of the company’s plans to move into a new frontier in addition to its crypto assets and social media platform: a $6 billion merger with a nuclear fusion power firm, TAE Technologies. Shareholders will vote on the merger Dec. 14.
The company reported $409.7 million in net income this quarter, compared with a $54.8 million loss a year earlier. Most of that came from $496.1 million in gains on its cryptocurrency and stock holdings, which the company described as noncash. Setting aside those gains and some other costs, the company’s core business lost $12.3 million, by its own accounting.
At the same time, the company is facing some hurdles. The company’s stock, seen as a market proxy for Trump, fell to a record low after Democrats control of both chambers of Congress last week, and congressional Democrats have vowed to investigate Trump’s businesses. But interim chief executive Kevin McGurn told investors to ignore that as noise and noted the market decline had no impact on the company’s balance sheet.
“We traded as a proxy for the news cycle and political sentiments, not for what we’re actually building day to day,” McGurn said. “While the market was trading on headlines, the underlying business didn’t flinch.”
The company highlighted its $2.5 billion in total assets. And it cited advertising as another area of revenue, including a $175,000 campaign for Freedom 250, an entity within the National Park Foundation, the official charity of the National Park Service. A key Trump fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, is a member of the Trump Media board as well as the National Park Foundation board.
There are pivotal moments for the company ahead.
At the end of the month, investors in a $1 billion bond offering could seek repayment on their investment, though a company representative said they did not yet know how much investors might seek to redeem.
The TAE merger is expected to go through by the end of the year. Trump’s trust, which owns 41 percent of the company, has agreed to vote for the merger.
Fusion technology is not yet commercially available, though Silicon Valley has poured billions into fusion firms, and Trump Media hopes TAE, founded in 1998, will offer the company a footing in the clean energy sector.
“We found a really nice synergy between the type of business that we were running, which is uncancellable technology built on our own back-end platform, and the only thing that could take us out of the mix, like the president being deplatformed by some of the other big social media companies, was energy,” McGurn told Axios last month. “So we went out and we found an energy company.”
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