For the first time in almost 30 years, part of Donald Trump’s business empire has gone public. Trading started with a bang.
Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of struggling social media platform Truth Social, is began its long-delayed journey as a public company at Tuesday’s opening bell under the ticker symbol “DJT.”
The stock surged about 56% at the open, to $78, and trading was briefly halted for volatility. Trump Media shares have since stabilized at around $70, marking a 40% increase from Monday’s close.
Wall Street is assigning Trump Media an eye-popping valuation of around $13 billion — a price tag that experts warn is untethered to reality.
The skyrocketing share price comes despite the fact that Trump Media is burning through cash; piling up losses; and its main product, Truth Social, is losing users.
“This is a very unusual situation. The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, who has been studying initial public offerings (IPOs) for over 40 years.
Trump hit with huge fine he can't pay -> Rumors of Trump trying to raise money from foreign governments -> Lawyers push back, say 'you can't just accept half a billion from foreigners to pay the fine, there are rules!' -> Truth Social IPO raises a bunch of money that (foreign) investors are willing to 'loose' when the stock inevitably collapses -> Trump puts up the stock as collateral to pay the bond to pay the fine.
What? He can't sell his stock for 6 months? No, he isn't selling it, he is putting it up for collateral, totally legal, totally won't be investigated by the SEC until he gets elected and fires the head of the SEC and the lawsuit goes away.
He can't use the stock as collateral for 6 months either or the other shareholders can sue. This dude is not a financial genius. People smarter than him have tried to game the system. Some win but there are a ton of laws and ways to sue for it.
"I'll settle my debts when I get to the White House."
Solid gamble for investors, honestly. Like, extremely good. If I was a subhuman parasitic dickworm or something, I'd put at least half my chips on red.
And seriously, look what we're doing. While we are talking about how he is going to repay his debts for [insert crooked fucking shit and prostitutes pissing on Trumps face here], we are not talking about how the FUCK a guy with his record is even allowed to run for president.
Just moving the goalposts, one investor at a time. Everyone knows this hog will get slaughtered sooner or later, and they are sucking its tiny teats for as much daddy milk they can before it dries up.
Then it's MTG's turn to be led to the top of the Aztec pyramid and control the world for a few years before she goes soccer mom tits up.
Revenue of $ 3.4 million should put it around a $ 34 million value, provided it had normal profit. But it operates at a deficit, and AFAIK a not impressive growth rate. So a more normal estimate would probably put the company about $ 20-25 million.
The talk about billions is ridiculous to a degree where it's either insane, or some sort of scheme exist to pump it to hundreds of times the actual value.
Originally it was just a modified Mastodon instance with federation removed. They hired Alex Gleason who maintains a fork of Pleroma called "Soapbox" to make significant changes to the front and back ends of the site.
Gleason also runs a handful of federated Soapbox instances, all of which are dedicated to far-right "free speech" content, mostly Nazism (Poast) and Trans-hate (Spinster). He also helps admin many other instances dedicated to hate speech.
Gleason has indicated that Truth Social and Poast run on basically the same codebase.
Quite disturbing to see the microblogging equivalent of The Daily Stormer with a multibillion dollar market cap on the stock market...
The logic is it's a megaphone plugged directly into the earholes of a shitload of very dumb, very angry people with plenty of disposable income. They might not give their money directly to Truth Social but Truth Social can give them lots of great ideas for who to give their money to.
True, yeah I guess the money they should be paying in child support or just feeding their kids isn't technically 'disposable', but if Truth Social can get to it before the kids do... I guess they owned the libs...
Oh absolutely. They buy into his bullshit products because they think it will make them money, but in the end they're worse off than when they started.
The best and most expensive megaphone. It's so great. You can write all these beautiful letters on it and you know folks, I can see those letters. Millions and millions of letters, in fact we have the best letters in the entire alphabet, it's true. Nobody on the internet has such a beautiful letters as I have. I practically invented them. And you can own some of those letters by buying the best stock on the market. It comes with a special orange colored email when you buy them. Just that email will be worth a gazillion because of contains my letters.
Make the internet GREAT AGAIN, folks !!!
I mean I was looking at it this afternoon market cap of 2.7 billion for a bunch of dumb angry people, who are listening to their obesed, dementing orange wannabe Jesus. It shows as someone else mentioned in this thread, (some) tech companies are just inflated air castles. If Trumps platform 2.7b worth the the real Jesus Must be a multi trillionaire
Let’s invest in the company most tied to the health of a single man. And let that man be high in years and eat McDonald’s like it was going out of style. That won’t ever backfire.
The minute he dies, all users start going elsewhere.
I don't think "con job" is the whole story here. There's always money to be made when morons gather together and soulless hedge fund managers don't care about the side effects. What better place could there be to sell advertising space for testosterone supplements and nuclear fallout shelters?
Not to mention all the free advertising for it from both social and mainstream media.
Con job is the name for what you described. It is short hand for confidence game and literally means "A confidence game, also known as a con, scam, grift, or flim flam, is an attempt to win the trust and confidence of a victim, known as the "mark," in order to defraud them."
Those soulless hedge fund managers and conning the investors and Trumpers to make money.
I am shocked hearing people say that out loud even. Isn't that extremely, painfully, provably obvious to everyone? No. It is not. It is a matter of "both sides" debate, apparently.
"Hi, I sell snake oil. It cures cancer!"
"Oooh, I LOVE not having cancer! I'll buy 1. No, wait, 1000!"
Just because they're not allowed to access banks doesn't mean they can't.
Lots of people, organizations, and even governments do all sorts of crimes even though they're really not supposed to. Conceptually speaking, money laundering is a fairly simple crime to do and, like so many crimes, it becomes easier to get away with the more powerful you are.
They can still trade in rubles with other countries that are willing to trade with them. It's not inconceivable that they can 'launder' a trade via, say India:
Russia buys a few billion-ruble toothbrushes from India
India invests the equivalent in USD with $DJT (minus a cut)
India uses those rubles to trade at market value for goods with other countries that also trade in rubles
It almost sounds like an in-power group of people who have a vested interest in other in-power people being able to leverage "value" of an asset to get out of trouble to then help the first group are artificially inflating the "value" of something they set.
Twitter is valued at around $19B by Musk himself, and it has around 300 million users. Truth has 500,000 users. They have 1/600th the users and are valued at 2/3rd. They only generated $5M in revenue while losing $50M in costs. Twitter had roughly 200 times higher revenue, yet only 50% higher value. It's insane how obviously wrong the valuation is. And the thing is, sometimes tech companies have seemingly high valuations when losing money but are still worth it because of the potential for growth... but where is the growth coming from for Truth? Ain't nobody jumping from Twitter for Truth that hasn't already. It's not like there's a huge boom of conservatives coming our way. If anything, Truth's current trend of losing users will only continue with Threads coming online and other social media outlets.
You know... In my life I've had to talk a few people out of scams.
I know they were scammed, it's blatantly a scam, the evidence is overwhelming, my experience is solid, everyone I know of's experience says the same.
Yet they will argue with you back and forth and never really be satisfied because they want to believe it so much, and I imagine it stings a good bit being told you're being ripped the fuck off and you're too stupid or inexperienced to understand that.
I'm never confrontational about it, I just make it very perfectly clear that proceeding would be extremely ill advised, and that even their own worries brought them to me asking for my opinion because they trust my judgment.
It scares me how long it takes to convince them, and how often in the end they come to me a month later and I ask them how it went, and they went and bought it anyway, for whatever far fetched rationalization they managed to construct for themselves.
Psychology is real, psychology is simple, all it takes to control humans is to have no care for anything but yourself.
"Yes, I know it's scammy, but I'm getting in on the ground floor so I'm not the one who will be holding the bag" is a sentiment I've seen (and occasionally held) entirely too often.
This is literally just a loophole to allow foreign governments to give Trump boatloads of cash. Instead of giving him explicit gifts, you prop up the price of his worthless company's shares
But which governments, though? Which one, there are so many... I can't think of a single one that would be motivated to influence US politics and do something so blatantly anti-democratic.
Reddit is mostly bots. Trump social is gullible idiots. Selling gold and prepper shit on Trump social is going to be profitable. Reddit ads are garbage and have been hated by the user base since their inception.
It's not higher then reddit, take a look at market cap vs last trade price, the current stock price is only part of the puzzle when it comes to valuing a company.
Could Trump's Truth Social stock value be powered by massive fraud? Experts say things like "slammed," "mystified," and "dazzled!" This and more for the next 24 hour news cycle until he does another damn fool thing that we can exploit.
The price it trades at doesn't mean hardly anything. You have to look at shares outstanding and total valuation and market cap to compare companies. And in that regard, reddit is about 4B more valuable that truth
At this point Trump is going for like an EGOT combination of federal agencies putting cases together against him. "Don't have the SEC yet, gotta add that one."
Hey, I miss WSB style action on Lemmy. There are no subs or instances for this, because we are deathcore communists who would never touch filthy wallets with our soil stained hands.
As tempting as that might be in the real world, in the financial world - this would be an expensive move, the most expensive short there is right now. Nearly all the available DJT stock was sold short but that has cost those people millions already.
Did you see what Taylor Swift was looking at recently? Her eyeballs glanced at something for like 5 seconds! What does it mean? The internet is just absolutely going crazy over the fact that insiders claim she farts sometimes too!
I remember something about a war in Europe, but then out of the blue came a super weak Hamas attack on Israel, and now I don't know who's warring whom anymore. Taylor Swift though, she's got above average looks and talent, so something is good in my world at least.
Gambling, in my personal opinion, is one of the absolutely most tragic and devastating dependencies there are, and I would include meth abuse among them. At least meth heads tend to live past 40 or so. You get gambling debts and you will be fitted with lead boots in the harbor. I lost my best friend to it, and I've seen others on the same path. Drugs are nothing compared to what gambling does to the brain. It's basically the same, only imagine a drug that you must take a new dose of every 0.82 seconds. Forever.
The shitty thing is, compared to drug addiction if you ODed usually you're the only one who got injured. But with gambling debt, even if you're already sleeping with the fishes, sometimes they still go after your family or business partners. That's what basically happened to my friend, his business partner drowned in debt, stole money from their business ventures and ran away, he's the one who must pay the debt because the dude promised he'll pay back after their business is up and running.
Value Investors might argue otherwise. I've got more than a few shares in stock with a sub-20 P/E ratio. They do exist and you can make money holding them.
They just don't have the rocket ship like growth of your Magnificent Seven or your even more speculative stocks.
As much as I'd just love to suffer through another press conference with roughly 10 reams of unprinted paper on the table to represent all the stocks he'll be divesting, Trump has reduced the level of discourse and political expectations so much he'll just claim democrats are the ones pushing for him to divest, refuse, and mainstream media won't even cover it.
The stock market is not about company fundamentals, which they may influence people. However at the end of day, the stock market is all about the feels.
It's literally a platform to talk to the most gullible and easily manipulated group of people. You can hate everything about the platform but you have to admit magas fall for everything and are willing to pay for it. These people bought trump bucks...
Ooh, I'm gonna go see how long it takes to be banned.
Ugh it's so calculated too... Just as Reddit went full retard, the Dumpf stands there welcoming the exodus to his Glorious One Regime As A Service.
What happened to Reddit after the Digg! migration was that Reddit turned into shit. And now reddit passes the concentrated shit onto the next gaping mouth who also happens to be President (because let's not kid ourselves, that's how we all know it will play out- we are not fighting the Republicans, we are fighting the Russians and the Republicans). When will the centipede stop feasting on our feces?
Short term options are currently valuing almost 400% volatility. Your gonna pay out the ass for put options or for the margin required for a short sale. I wouldn't go anywhere near this.
Doesn't matter if he can outrun the consequences. Pretty sad that an out of shape piece of shit like Don Poorleon can outpace the American justice system.