Hiltzik: Too bad if you invested in Trump's Truth Social

By Michael HiltzikBusiness Columnist

Aug. 20, 2024 1:13 PM PT

Hiding in plain sight in the first annual report issued by the parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform was a statement of inescapable, well, truth.

Issued, perhaps appropriately, on April 1 by Trump Media and Technology Group, the report said: “The value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Trump were to suffer.” This was cited as a “risk factor” in holding the company’s stock.

So here we are. Since July 21, when President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to run against Trump, the stock has been spiraling toward oblivion.

TMTG may lack any meaningful remedy if President Donald J. Trump minimizes his future use of Truth Social.

— Trump Media and Technology Group acknowledges the limits of Donald Trump’s duty to use his own social media platform

From then through Tuesday, shares of the company bearing Trump’s initials (DJT) as its ticker symbol have lost nearly 39% of its value. (The broad stock market as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has gained almost 2% over the same time span.)

The shares have gained in daily value only five times during that period, and lost ground on 17. The shares closed Tuesday at $21.42, down 82 cents or 3.71%, following a slide of 3.56% the day before.

In the context of the grand sweep of DJT’s history as a publicly traded company, that’s not so remarkable. Measured from its closing price of $57.99 on March 26, when it went public, the stock is down about 63%. Measured from its peak of $79.38, which it reached that day before pulling back, the loss is 73%. Choose which of these calculations you wish; either one fits the dictionary definition of “ugly.”

It’s certainly possible that DJT will have recovered some or all of its daily decline by the end of Tuesday’s trading, and even possible that it will emerge from the longer-term schneid in which it currently seems imprisoned. The stock’s volatility has made GameStop look like a sober, stable financial asset.

That said, however, the headwinds are building — not that they were ever any secret.

The principal headwind, of course, is the one telegraphed in that annual report: Trump himself. Since Biden’s withdrawal upended the presidential race and brought Kamala Harris to the fore, Trump’s prospects for victory in the November election have distinctly faded.

In parallel, Trump’s rhetoric and behavior on the stump have become more unhinged and febrile. His standing among the MAGA faithful may have remained solid, but his appeal to independent voters appears to have shrunk — it certainly hasn’t been enhanced. Since DJT is seen as a proxy for his electoral campaign, its slide in value is unsurprising.

But other counterweights have become more significant. One is the question of what Trump intends to do with his own shares in the company, which came to 59.9% of the total shares as of mid-July, according to its financial disclosures. Trump will be entitled to sell any or all of those shares starting in mid-September, when a six-month lockup period expires.

Any indication that Trump is moving to liquidate his exposure to DJT would almost certainly crater the shares’ price; anticipation that he is plotting to leave his outside investors in the lurch, as he has done to investors, partners and customers in other ventures, may account for some of the shares’ weakness.

Trump owns so much of the company that he might be able to realize $1 billion or more via stock sales before other shareholders have a chance to get out the door without taking a loss.

Trump already has shown that he doesn’t take his responsibility to support Truth Social very seriously. He established the platform as a branded alternative to Twitter (now X) after he was thrown off Twitter following the Jan. 6 insurrection. But there is no contractual requirement binding Trump to use Truth Social as his exclusive social media outlet.

One provision of his licensing agreement with DJT requires that he post his personal social media communications on Truth Social six hours before posting them on other platforms.

But his deal with the company allows him to post “politically-related” messages on any platform he chooses — and he has the sole right to determine which posts fall into that category. The company says it “lacks any meaningful remedy” if it disagrees with his designation of posts as “politically-related.”

Elon Musk restored Trump’s account on X in November; he posted there rarely until recently, when his activity picked up. And Trump has posted some tweets on that platform. More notably, on Aug. 12, he Joined Musk for a two-hour rambling, glitch-marred “interview” on X, not Truth Social.

Then there’s the stature of the company as a going concern. It issues all the disclosures required of a public company in the U.S., but anyone reading them would be well advised to open a window first.

Financially speaking, although it still has a market value of $4 billion, the company doesn’t resemble any enterprise that could have been imagined by the value-investing pioneers Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. In its most recent quarterly disclosure, issued Aug. 12, it reported a loss of $344 million on revenue of $1.4 million for the first six months of this year.

No one who has followed Trump’s career with any modicum of attention could be shocked by those figures — or indeed by the fact that the stock has done as well as it has despite them.

Truth Social has been a joke from the inception — a joke on many of the same people still flying “Trump Won” flags from their front yards or wearing red MAGA hats in mixed company. As I wrote prior to the IPO, it was taken public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a process that was often employed to circumvent government rules for disclosures to investors. SPACs have fallen out of favor because so many of those deals went bust; Truth Social boasted the highest profile of any of them, but its fate may not be any different.

In that first annual report issued on April Fools Day, the company revealed that it scarcely considered itself a real social media business at all. It said it had no plans to “collect, monitor or report” the traditional metrics used by other social media platforms, such as “average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, ... monthly and daily active users” — in other words, all the statistics that tell a social media company who is using it, if anyone, and what their participation is worth in dollars and cents.

Having that information would only “divert” the company’s management, the report said, though it wasn’t clear about how management would fashion a strategy for the future if it doesn’t know where it is at present, including just how many users it has.

I wrote in 2021, when the SPAC deal to take Truth Social public was first announced, that it was poised to set a high-water mark for dubious investment schemes. In April, a month after the IPO, I wrote that that Trump might end up laughing all the way to the bank, but his investors would be left with nothing but tears.

We’re well on the way to that glorious moment when I can say, “I told you so.” Or maybe we’re there already.