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Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social landed last week on the stock market as a publicly traded company with a whole lot of hype—share prices rocketed as high as $79, instantly adding as much as $6.2 billion to the former president’s wealth, at least on paper. But then reality hit. On Monday, Truth Social, which trades under the ticker symbol DJT, posted its financials from last year. They are grim. The stock went spiraling down immediately. By the end of trading on Monday, the stock had closed at $48.66, and Trump had lost an estimated $2.4 billion of wealth since the stock’s high-point last week.
According to the company’s new filings SEC filings, it earned just $4 million in revenue last year. And in the fourth quarter, it made just $750,000 in revenue. Granted it’s not easy to make money running a social media firm—Twitter has rarely been profitable—but that is a very low figure, even for a company that has just 10 million downloads of its app. And the company is spending much more than it is earning: it lost an estimated $58 million in 2023. A big portion of that loss—$40 million—came from interest expenses, but it also lost about $14 million in business expenses.
With the company going public, it did get access to about $300 million in investor funds to help it survive. But it has already spent a chunk of that settling an SEC probe, and that cash could go quickly if it doesn’t add more users. For a company that has so few users—the Washington Post estimated that last Monday it had just 277,000 users, the most of any day last month, compared to tens of millions for its competitors—its books are larded with high salaries for executives, like $750,000 for CEO and former Congressman Devin Nunes, who could get a bump to $1 million within two years. Prior to joining Truth Social, Nunes’ most notable social media experience may have been filing a lawsuit against a Twitter account pretending to be one of the cows from his family’s farm.
There are also big checks for “advisors,” including close Trump associates Dan Scavino, who is earning $240,000 a year, and Kash Patel, who is getting another $130,000. Scavino worked for Trump, managing various golf courses, before following him to the White House where he ran Trump’s social media accounts.
The stock price, which debuted at $48.03, hit several highs last week, as excitement from investors buoyed it. But the reality of the poor financials behind the company set in right from the opening bell on Monday. On a day when the rest of the market was slightly down or flat—the Dow Jones fell by 0.6 percent, and the NASDAQ rose slightly—Truth Social’s stock slid 21.47 percent. The stock has no major institutional backers—large investment firms and banks have stayed away—and a larger than usual percentage of the company’s backers seem to be small retail investors. While they stand to get badly hurt if the price continues to drop, any share price above zero will still be a benefit to Trump, who, according to filings, has put none of his own money into the venture.
