Donald Trump is richer than he’s ever been, and it’s all thanks to a back-door deal to take his latest venture public.
Trump Media & Technology Group, which generated less than $4 million in revenue for the first nine months of last year, was worth $8.4 billion on Thursday, bringing — on paper — a massive windfall to its largest shareholder: Trump himself.
The money may come in handy for Trump, who faces 88 felony charges in four different cases on top of massive damage awards in civil cases as he campaigns for the White House, The Business Times reports.
Investigations into insider-trading and money-laundering allegations by the Justice Department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a flurry of lawsuits, threatened to torpedo the deal.
Yet these obstacles fed Trump Media’s anti-establishment narrative, and investing in the company became a way to support Trump as he pursues a return to the presidency.
In turn, the stock — which originally traded under Digital World’s ticker DWAC — has soared 254% this year as Trump steamrolled his Republican rivals for the party’s presidential nomination. DWAC “gave him the opportunity to, in effect, turn his celebrity into a publicly traded security,” according to Bloomberg Opinion’s Matt Levine.
With the stock, which now trades under Trump’s initials DJT, continuing to advance, it has taken on qualities similar to stocks that were embraced by hordes of amateur traders in early 2021. They drove up the price of GameStop to thwart hedge funds that had shorted its shares. The mania sent shares of the video-game retailer soaring, to the delight of Redditors.
While Trump Media’s financial statements may look paltry so far, it’s difficult to use traditional metrics such as price-to-sales ratios to value the company.
As Matthew Tuttle, the chief executive and chief investment officer at Tuttle Capital Management, put it: “This is a meme stock, it’s not the type of thing where you bust out P/E ratios — you can throw that out the window.” Read more.
