Former president Donald Trump’s social media company said Monday it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock plunging more than 21 percent only days after a highflying public debut set the company’s value at more than $8 billion.
Media
Trump Media plunges as Truth Social’s $58 million loss reported – The Washington Post
Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including less than $1 million in the last quarter.
The nosediving share price of the company — which uses the stock ticker DJT, for Trump’s initials — fell to its lowest level since Trump Media went public last week and shaved more than a fifth of its market value in a single day. It also slashed the value of Trump’s 57 percent ownership in the company by roughly $1 billion, to $3.8 billion.
The new financial figures throw into stark relief the gap between Trump Media’s highly hyped investor-driven valuation on the public stock market and the reality of its business performance.
They also raise questions about the possibility that Trump could use the company as a financial lifeline. Trump cannot sell his shares or use them as collateral for a loan for six months because of a provision in the company’s merger agreement, known as a lockup.
The company’s board could vote to waive that requirement but has yet to do so, the filings state. Cashing out early could sink the stock price further by flooding the market with shares and undermining investor confidence in Trump’s commitment to the brand, financial analysts said.
Trump, who invested no money in Trump Media, was given 78 million shares of the company last week and stands to earn tens of millions more over the next three years if the stock stays above $12 to $17, a filing shows.
Trump Media said in a filing that it expects to incur more “operating losses and negative cash flows” as it works to expand its user base but that it expects its growth will come from Truth Social’s “overall appeal.”
The company said in a filing that its management had “substantial doubt” as of the end of last year that it would have enough money to pay its debts as they come due. The company paid nearly $40 million in interest expenses last year and racked up about $16 million in operating losses.
Trump’s company unlocked nearly $300 million in investor funds last week when it finalized a merger deal with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company that helped take Trump Media public.
Trump Media said in a filing that it aimed to spend some of that money toward “strategic investments” in marketing, advertising sales and other technology. About $18 million of it was also paid toward an SEC settlement announced last year.
The company has declined to share performance indicators like those common across the tech industry, such as its number of active users, and said it may continue to withhold such figures. Focusing on those numbers, the company said, “might not align with the best interests” of Trump Media or its shareholders.
Trump Media’s wild booms and busts over the last week have driven some observers to regard it as a “meme stock,” whose value is derived less from its fundamentals and more from investors’ personal feelings about its namesake brand.
That separation of stock value from the company’s ability to make money could hurt it in the long run, said Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who predicted the share price would continue to decline.
“The stock will almost certainly remain extremely volatile, with both some big upswings and downswings on a daily basis,” he said. But “the long-term trend will be down.”
Trump Media, which makes money through advertising on Truth Social, has struggled to gain a broad audience after two years of operation, according to estimates from the online analytics firm SimilarWeb. On the company’s first day of public trading last week, Truth Social’s website saw its highest-traffic day of the month, with roughly 277,000 U.S. visitors, the estimates show.
That is a small fraction of most online platforms: On that same day, the discussion-board service Reddit saw more than 32 million U.S. visitors, the estimates show. Reddit, which went public a few days before Trump Media and is trading at a similar stock price, generated $800 million in revenue last year, or more than 200 times Trump Media’s 2023 revenue.
Trump’s company said it has begun testing a “state-of-the-art technology that supports video streaming and provides a ‘home’ for canceled content creators,” which it “aims to acquire and incorporate into its product offerings and/or services as soon as practicable.” The company did not respond to a request for comment seeking further details.
The Trump Media board includes Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.; Robert E. Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative; Linda McMahon, his former administrator of the Small Business Administration; and Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s National Security Council and was paid $130,000 by Trump Media last year through a consulting agreement.
Trump Media’s chief executive, the former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, was given 115,000 shares, a stake worth more than $5 million today. He and other board members are bound by the same lockup agreement.
Nunes is paid a $750,000 salary that is subject to increase to $1 million within two years, filings show. The company chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, and chief operating officer, Andrew Northwall, are each paid about $350,000. Nunes, Juhan and Northwall will also each receive $600,000 “retention bonuses” this month.
Dan Scavino Jr., Trump’s White House social media director and an adviser to his 2024 presidential campaign, was also paid $240,000 last year through a consulting agreement that listed him as an independent contractor, a filing shows. He, too, will be given a $600,000 retention bonus.
Trump himself could receive 36 million more shares in the coming weeks as long as the stock price stays above $17.50 for “20 out of any 30 trading days,” according to a company “earnout” provision.
The company’s filings Monday note that five lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks involving Trump Media, Digital World, Trump Media’s co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, and Digital World’s former chief Patrick Orlando.
Digital World dropped one lawsuit last week after its biggest founding investor — Arc Global Investments II, which is managed by Orlando — voted in favor of the merger. But the other cases are still active, and they include claims from Litinsky, Moss and Orlando that the company had worked to improperly dilute their shares.
Trump Media said in a Monday filing that one ongoing lawsuit, jointly filed by Trump Media and Digital World against Orlando and Arc, could prove “costly and time consuming” and have an adverse effect on Trump Media’s reputation.
In the newest lawsuit, filed last week in a Florida circuit court, Trump Media alleged that Moss and Litinsky had mismanaged the company but that Truth Social had since become “among the fastest growing social media platforms in history.”
correction
A previous version of this article misstated the position of a member of Trump Media’s executive team due to a misstatement in the company’s filing. Andrew Northwall is the company’s chief operating officer, not its chief financial officer. The article has been corrected.
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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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