Trump Media lost $58 million on $4 million in sales last year

Donald Trump’s net worth tumbled by $1 billion along with the shares of his social media business after it disclosed a more than $58 million loss in 2023, as revenue for the former president’s Truth Social platform trickled in. Trump Media &Technology Group Corp.’s stock fell 21% Monday to $48.66 per share, below the $49.95 level where the blank-check vehicle it merged with was trading a week ago. Trump owns 57% of the company, according to the filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with his stake now worth $3.76 billion on paper. The slump takes his net worth to $6.4 billion, a fall of 14%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Trump Media generated just $4.1 million in revenue for the full year, results reported in a filing Monday morning show, underscoring how richly valued it is relative to its peers. The company doesn’t report active user numbers, disclosing in its prospectus in February only that Truth Social has about 9 million signups across its platforms.

The firm has still delivered a meteoric gain this year to date, with its market value sitting at about $6.6 billion after it became a meme stock and captivated retail traders.

Reddit Inc. — which went public last month and has a similar valuation — had 267.5 million weekly active users in the last quarter, and delivered $804 million in revenue last year. Meanwhile Snap Inc., which has a market value of $19 billion, had a net loss of $1.3 billion on $4.6 billion in sales last year. Snap estimated daily active users for the first-quarter of about 420 million.

The discrepancy between where Trump Media’s shares trade and how the underlying business performs indicates that some investors use it to signal they support Trump’s push for re-election. The stock, which has been trading since 2021 under the SPAC’s ticker, has more than tripled this year as the retail-trading crowd pumps it with posts across Stocktwits and Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum.

In the filing, Trump Media’s revenue inched higher from $1.47 million in 2022 as it swung to an annual loss. The company recorded a $50.5 million profit in 2022 after getting a boost from a change in the value related to its convertible notes.

Unlike traditional social-media companies that tout metrics like active users or revenue per user, Trump Media “believes that adhering to traditional key performance indicators” could “divert its focus from strategic evaluation with respect to the progress and growth of its business,” according to the prospectus. When regulators inquired about Truth Social’s number of signups and users, the company pushed back, and ultimately disclosed only the signups, filings show.

Trump can’t sell the stake immediately due to a six-month lock-up agreement, hindering his ability to monetize the shares and ease his present cash crunch.

Trump’s media company debuted last week with the closing of the merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp.