President Donald Trump’s social media company has recorded a comically bad 12-month stretch in the stock market during a year that has been largely prosperous for everyone else.
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the owner of the president’s Truth Social platform, saw its share price plunge 69 percent since January, while reporting an operating loss of $186.1 million, according to Bloomberg News.
The company’s shares got a temporary boost on Thursday following the announcement of a deal with nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, but the current price of $14.86 as of Friday morning remains far below the year’s high of $42.91, recorded on January 13.
Matthew A. Winkler, editor-in-chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, described investors in Trump’s media group as being “among the biggest losers in a stock market that rallied from Amsterdam to Sydney this year, proving the peril of riding the coattails of a huckster with a history of running businesses that go bust.”
Winkler went on to detail just how badly Trump’s media company has performed in a year when the stock market broadly thrived.
The Russell 1000 Index, which tracks the performance of the 1,000 largest publicly traded U.S. companies, ranked TMTG as the worst performer among the 20 internet companies listed in the index, despite most of its peers posting gains.
Trump Media also ranks last among the 97 publicly traded internet media services companies worldwide with a market capitalization of at least $1 billion.
On Thursday, TMTG and TAE Technologies announced an extraordinary merger between a social media company and a fusion power firm valued at more than $6 billion.
In a press release about the deal, TMTG said it hopes to combine its “significant capital” with TAE’s fusion technology to build the “world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant” by 2026, claiming it would help America “win the AI revolution and maintain its global economic dominance.”
The announcement sent TMTG’s stock sharply higher from Wednesday’s closing price of $10.47, but shares remain roughly two-thirds below their January peak.
Winkler also warned investors who are thinking that the deal with TAE may spark a turnaround for the flailing company.
“Anyone wondering what professional stock analysts have to say will search in vain because Trump Media is the only company among its 20 domestic peers with no widely disseminated 12-month target share price, revenue estimates, or earnings forecasts on the Bloomberg terminal,” Winkler wrote.
“The spaces where such information would normally appear are blank for Trump Media. It is also one of only seven companies in the Russell 1000 Index with no target share price.”
A TMTG spokesperson said the merger would help both companies.
“Our merger will benefit both companies, and especially Americans who want lower energy prices and energy independence. Big losers from the deal include partisan media outlets that root for us to fail.”
The post Trump Media Was This Year’s Big Loser Despite Soaring Market appeared first on The Daily Beast.
