Former President Trump’s Truth Social is coming to Wall Street — with a multi-billion dollar price tag.
The Trump Media & Technology Group, whose main product is the social media site Truth Social, rocketed Monday on the news it filed paperwork in Delaware to merge with a shell company and will start trading on the tech-heavy NASDAQ platform.
It will use the catchy ticker symbol DJT, which are Trump’s initials.
The soaring stock price, which climbed by more than 30% on Monday, would value the company at more than $5 billion, which could give Trump an eye-popping personal windfall of about $3 billion for the 79 million shares he owns.
The former president is barred from selling the shares for six months, although the company could tweak those restrictions.
The newly-public Trump Media company will still be led by ex-Rep. Devin Nunes, a MAGA loyalist who ran the firm before the big money merger with the Digital World Acquisition Corp. shell company.
Truth Social, which Trump uses to post statements and announcements, prides itself on being a haven for free speech, although rival X, formerly known as Twitter, has also welcomed back Trump after he was banned from the platform following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.
“We will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the Internet from Big Tech censors,” Nunes said in a statement celebrating the filing. “We will continue to fulfill our commitment to Americans to serve as a safe harbor for free expression and to stand up to the ever-growing army of speech suppressors.”
The timing of the public offering as Trump scrambles for cash to pay a bond to allow him to appeal the monster $450 million judgment in his New York civil fraud case.
An appeals court Monday cut him a break in that case by slashing the required bond to $175 million. A Manhattan judge separately dealt a blow to Trump by ordering him to face trial on April 15 in the criminal case tied to hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Some financial experts question the price tag that investors have slapped on Trump Media. They note that Truth Social, like X and other social media companies, has struggled to keep users and is losing cash, with the company reporting just $3 million in revenue and a loss of $49 million for the first nine months of 2023.
One of the biggest investors in Trump Media is billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a Republican megadonor who also owns a big chunk of ByteDance, the Chinese-based company that owns TikTok.
The former president reversed his call for TikTok to be banned in the U.S. after the two men recently met, although Trump denies that they discussed the controversial app, which critics say doubles as a data-mining and political manipulation tool for Communist Beijing.
