Former president Donald Trump’s social media company generated just $4 million in revenue last year — about as much as the average McDonald’s franchise in the United States, according to a report last year by the fast-food industry publication QSR.
Media
Trump Media paid out millions to its executives. Here’s who got what. – The Washington Post
But that hasn’t stopped Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, from granting Trump a share package now worth billions of dollars — or from paying its leaders millions of dollars in salaries, bonuses and stock, according to documents it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump Media, based in Sarasota, Fla., has only 36 employees and lost $58 million last year, the filings show. The online analytics firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social’s traffic is less than 1 percent of Reddit’s, a platform that received $800 million in revenue last year.
But a stock-market frenzy has supersized Trump Media’s value to about $5.5 billion — more than the market values of Macy’s, Columbia Sportswear and Alaska Airlines, which make billions in revenue a year.
The Washington Post shared with Trump Media the numbers it intended to highlight in this report, all of which were taken from the company’s filings. Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine responded in a statement: “Truth Social just successfully launched as a public company, with a committed and expanding audience of millions of users, so it’s no surprise the partisan activists at The Washington Post — already the target of ongoing legal action for its defamatory reporting on us — would gin up this sort of ridiculous hit piece.”
Trump Media sued The Post for defamation last year, saying the news organization had reported incorrectly on allegations concerning its financing. A federal judge in Florida recently dismissed the case but said Trump Media could amend its complaint if it believes it can state a viable claim.
Donald Trump
Trump is Trump Media’s biggest shareholder, with 57.3 percent of the company, or 78.7 million shares — a stake worth about $3.2 billion based on the stock’s closing price Friday.
Through an “earnout” provision, Trump stands to receive another 36 million shares if the price stays above $17.50 for 20 days, which could happen as soon as April 26 and would raise his total stake to $4.7 billion.
A six-month “lockup” agreement says Trump can’t sell or transfer his shares until Sept. 25 — or possibly a few days earlier, if the stock hits a certain price threshold. Trump could ask the company’s board to waive that requirement but has yet to do so. The lockup also applies to company executives and board members.
Three people on Trump Media’s seven-member board of directors have been compensated with either stock or cash or both.
Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s chief executive and president, received 115,000 shares, worth about $4.6 million. He was paid a $750,000 salary last year that increased to $1 million this year.
Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California, also will receive a $600,000 lump-sum “retention bonus” this month. A bonus agreement signed by Nunes said the money was designed to help “ensure the continuity” of Trump Media’s business.
Board member Eric Swider, who was chief executive of the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media, and Renatus, his consulting firm in Puerto Rico, received about 153,000 shares as part of the merger deal, a stake worth $6.2 million.
Another board member, Kash Patel, a former Nunes aide who served on Trump’s National Security Council, was paid $130,000 last year as part of a consulting agreement with his company, Trishul. A filing says Patel also serves as a “national security adviser to [Trump] as a private citizen” and receives payment for that service from Trump’s Save America political action committee.
The other four board members — Trump’s former trade representative Robert E. Lighthizer; Trump’s former Small Business Administration leader Linda McMahon; the Louisiana attorney W. Kyle Green; and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. — were not paid last year, though a filing said the board could give itself “stock as non-cash compensation … from time to time.”
One former board member, Dan Scavino Jr., a longtime Trump aide who led his White House’s social media operation and is now advising Trump’s presidential campaign, was paid $240,000 last year through a consulting agreement with his company, Hudson Digital. Scavino will also receive a $600,000 retention bonus this month.
Trump Media also issued a $2.2 million “executive promissory note” to Scavino. The company gave similar promissory notes to other executives, which automatically converted on the day of the merger into stock. The filings do not specify whether Scavino’s note was converted.
The executives
Trump Media’s chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, received 490,000 shares, worth $19.8 million. He was paid $337,500 last year, and his salary jumped to $365,000 when the merger closed. He last worked as the finance chief of a chain of fitness clubs.
Chief operating officer Andrew Northwall received 20,000 shares, worth $812,000. He was paid $365,000 last year. Previously he worked at Parler, the social network that was popular among pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Juhan and Northwall also will receive $600,000 retention bonuses this month.
Other executives will receive a total of $1.24 million in bonuses. They include chief technology officer Vladimir Novachki, who also received 45,000 shares, worth $1.8 million, and general counsel Scott Glabe, who received 20,000 shares, worth $812,000. Glabe served as an associate White House counsel under Trump.
The founders
Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who met Trump on “The Apprentice” and helped launch the business in 2021, received a combined 7.5 million shares through their partnership, United Atlantic Ventures, a stake worth about $304 million.
Arc Global Investments II, the biggest founding investor in Digital World Acquisition, the company that merged with Trump Media to take it public, said in a filing it received 13.3 million shares, worth about $539 million. A previous filing by Trump Media said Arc would receive 9.5 million shares.
Arc and Digital World are involved in a legal dispute regarding how many shares Arc is owed. Arc is managed by Digital World’s former chief executive Patrick Orlando.
The lenders
Trump Media said it had helped fund its operations by issuing 19 convertible notes since 2021 in exchange for loans with a total face value of more than $40 million. The holders of those notes, most of whom the filings do not identify, can convert the unpaid principal into stock. The company said several of the notes had been amended or extended since they were issued, and that it had an “ongoing disagreement” with one noteholder over their “differing interpretations of certain terms.”
The company also said it had issued convertible notes to unnamed investors for “working capital purposes” during the last quarter of 2023, and that more than $1 million of the notes remained outstanding by the end of the year.
The lawyers
The Trump Media deal sits at the center of four ongoing lawsuits, all of which were filed within the last two months:
- Trump Media and Digital World sued Arc and Orlando in Florida, saying their “irrational and disturbing behavior” had “imposed massive costs” and caused “extensive reputational harm.”
- Litinsky and Moss’ United Atlantic Ventures sued Trump Media in Delaware, saying Trump had pushed a “last-minute stock grab” that would dilute their shares. Trump is scheduled to be deposed in that lawsuit this month.
- Arc sued Digital World, its chief executive and three board members in Delaware, saying they had worked to deprive Orlando of millions of shares.
- Trump Media sued Moss, Litinsky and Orlando in Florida, accusing the co-founders of mismanaging the company with a “toxic corporate culture” and seeking to force the forfeiture of their shares. The Delaware judge in the United Atlantic Ventures lawsuit said at a hearing April 1 that he was “gobsmacked” that Trump Media filed this suit when the dispute was already playing out in his court.
Digital World said it spent $19.6 million on “legal investigations” last year, mostly due to its $18 million settlement with the SEC, a Trump Media filing shows.
Trump Media also agreed last year to pay an unnamed law firm $500,000 for services, the filing said. In November, the firm was issued a $500,000 convertible note with a conversion price of $10 per share; that stake is worth $2 million today.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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