Business
Column: Trump's Truth Social stock is circling the drain
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 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.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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