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.

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.

Former top Seagram and Warner Music executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. has entered the fray to acquire Paramount Global, throwing an 11th-hour curveball in an already chaotic auction of the storied Hollywood entertainment company.

Bronfman submitted a bid Monday to take control of the media conglomerate that owns CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and the Paramount film studio by acquiring the Redstone family holding company, National Amusements Inc., said three sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly. Bronfman’s bid is valued at about $4.3 billion.

The offer comes a month after Shari Redstone and Paramount’s other board members approved a bid from tech scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media to buy Paramount in a multipronged transaction valued at $8.4 billion.

Bronfman is leading an investor group that includes longtime media executives Jon Miller, Steven Paul and John Martin.

“We believe there is significant upside in the Paramount business and in the value of Paramount’s shares,” Bronfman wrote said in a letter to Paramount’s lead independent director, Charles Phillips, which was viewed by The Times.

Bronfman’s offer lands just two days before Paramount’s window to accept alternative bids to Skydance’s proposal closes. Paramount’s special board committee, led by Phillips, must now weigh the two offers for the struggling media company.

Skydance’s deal allowed for a 45-day window during which Paramount could consider competing offers.

A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment on the bid, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

It’s not clear that Bronfman’s play for Paramount will be successful.

Shari Redstone has long preferred Ellison’s bid over other those of potential suitors, believing the 41-year-old entrepreneur possesses the ambition, experience and financial heft to lift Paramount from its doldrums.

His father, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, also is backing his son’s effort to build a larger media empire by merging Skydance and Paramount.

Under terms of the proposed deal, Skydance and its financial partners RedBird Capital Partners and private equity firm KKR have agreed to provide a $1.5-billion cash infusion to help Paramount pay down debt. Their deal sets aside $4.5 billion to buy shares of Paramount’s Class B shareholders who are eager to exit.

Non-Redstone Class A shareholders would receive $23 a share to exit. Investors could maintain their shares in the new entity.

But some shareholders have bristled over Ellison’s proposal, alleging that it places an inflated value on Skydance, which has co-produced some of Paramount’s biggest blockbuster movies, including “Top Gun: Maverick.” The subsequent all-stock merger of Skydance into Paramount values Ellison’s firm at $4.75 billion.

Bronfman is seeking to capitalize on controversy over that component of the deal.

“Our proposal eliminates the risks, uncertainties and costs of combining Paramount with Skydance,” Bronfman wrote. “We believe Paramount is most valuable as a standalone business.”

Paramount executives have initiated a deep round of cost-cutting, including eliminating about 2,000 job cuts to achieve $500 million in annual savings. The company suffered a credit downgrade earlier this year.

Bronfman’s group believes it could slash another $3 billion in permanent costs by achieving greater profits in the streaming division, employing artificial intelligence in business functions and “right sizing the bloated corporate structure,” according to their letter.

Under both scenarios, the Redstone family would receive $1.75 billion for National Amusements — a company that holds the family’s Paramount shares and a regional movie theater chain founded during the Great Depression — after the firm’s considerable debts are paid off.

Bronfman’s group said they would pay non-Redstone A-Class shareholders $24.53 a share — more than what’s envisioned in the Skydance deal. Non-voting B-Class shareholders could cash out at $16 a share.

Paramount shares traded at $10.86 Tuesday morning, falling about 2%.

The late Sumner Redstone’s National Amusements was once valued at nearly $10 billion, but pandemic-related theater closures, last year’s Hollywood labor strikes and a heavy debt burden sent its fortunes spiraling. In the last five years, the New York-based company has lost two-thirds of its value.

Paramount has agreed to pay a $400-million breakup fee to Skydance if the deal doesn’t close.

Bronfman’s bid would cover that $400-million breakup fee, the Wall Street Journal reported.

A New York Supreme Court judge on Monday denied motions by talent agency CAA, Walt Disney Co. and Miramax to dismiss actress Julia Ormond’s lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein for sexual battery.

The suit, filed last October, named CAA for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty, as well as Walt Disney Co. and Miramax, accusing them of negligent supervision and retention.

“The complaint sufficiently alleges that CAA failed to protect plaintiff from Weinstein, failing to warn her of his alleged reputation while at the same time negotiating the production company agreement between the plaintiff and Miramax, and later arranging the dinner meeting between plaintiff and Weinstein,” said the court in its ruling.

Disney owned Miramax at the time of the alleged assault.

“We are very pleased by the Court’s decision, which is a complete repudiation of CAA, Disney, and Miramax’s attempts to evade accountability for their failure to protect Julia Ormond from Harvey Weinstein. The case will now proceed to discovery, where, thanks to Ms. Ormond’s bravery, we will be able to expose the truth of how these powerful Hollywood companies enabled Harvey Weinstein,” said Ormond’s attorneys Meredith A. Firetog and Kevin Mintzer in a statement to The Times.

“We respectfully disagree with the Court’s ruling and continue to believe there is no legal or factual basis for Ms. Ormond’s claims against CAA,” said a spokesperson for the agency in a statement. “While we have deep compassion for Ms. Ormond and are incredibly disturbed by what she says she suffered at the hands of Weinstein, CAA did not learn of Weinstein’s sexually assaultive behavior until it became public knowledge decades later. As a result, the claim that CAA should have warned Ms. Ormond about Weinstein’s criminal conduct in December 1995 defies logic.”

Representatives for Disney were not immediately available for comment.

Ormond, who starred in such films as “Legends of the Fall” and the remake of “Sabrina,” alleged that the disgraced movie mogul sexually assaulted her in December 1995 after a business dinner in New York City, where the two were to discuss a project.

She further alleged that after she informed her agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane, currently CAA’s co-chairmen, they did nothing to help her and instead cautioned her about speaking out.

Lourd and Huvane were not named as defendants in the suit. However, their names were cited throughout the complaint.

“The men at CAA who represented Ormond knew about Weinstein. So too did Weinstein’s employers at Miramax and Disney,” the lawsuit states. “Brazenly, none of these prominent companies warned Ormond that Weinstein had a history of assaulting women because he was too important, too powerful, and made them too much money.”

Weinstein insisted on discussing a project at the Manhattan apartment Miramax provided for the English actor, part of her two-year, first-look deal with the company, according to the complaint.

Once there, Ormond, who was “inebriated” to the point she could not put the keys in the door, says despite her protests, Weinstein “stripped naked,” forced her to give him a massage, climbed on top of her, masturbated and then forced her “to perform oral sex on him.”

A few weeks after the alleged assault, Ormond traveled to Copenhagen to work on a film and was informed that Weinstein planned to visit her.

“Horrified,” according to the suit, she called her agents at CAA, Lourd and Huvane, to “plead with them to prevent Weinstein from coming to Copenhagen.” They declined to intervene, the suit states.

Ormond filed her lawsuit under the Adult Survivors Act, that was passed in New York in 2022. It established a one-year “lookback” window for survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were over the age of 18, regardless of when it took place.

Weinstein’s attorney Imran H. Ansari, “categorically denie[d] the allegations made against him by Julia Ormond and he is prepared to vehemently defend himself,” according to a statement after the suit was filed.

At the time of the filing, CAA called the claims baseless.

The agency said that Ormond’s legal counsel approached them in March about the allegations. The Century City-based agency then hired attorney Loretta Lynch and her law firm, Paul, Weiss. The firm’s review “found nothing to support Ms. Ormond’s claims against CAA.”

Ormond’s attorneys asked CAA to pay $15 million in exchange for Ormond not making public allegations against the agency, which it rejected, CAA said.

At the Bloomberg Screentime conference last year, Lourd said: “We were falsely accused of something that we did not do and we are going to address those accusations in court in a proper forum.”

In April, a New York appellate court decided to overturn Weinstein’s rape conviction in a separate case, saying a state judge erred in allowing three women to testify at trial despite no charges being filed against the movie mogul in connection with their accusations.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an extradition warrant seeking the transfer of Harvey Weinstein from custody in New York to California, where he was previously convicted on rape charges.

Staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report