Donald Trump’s legal troubles are hurting his social-media platform and thus his financial prospects.
Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs Truth Social, were trading for a little more than $49 at the beginning of June. Now, CNBC reports that those same shares are selling for $27.50 as of Thursday, after a marathon sell-off period that has lasted weeks.
At first, it looked as though Truth Social would provide Trump with a much-needed financial windfall after being ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million from her defamation case as well as the $454 million penalty levied against him in his civil fraud trial.
When the company first went public and under Trump’s initials DJT, it was valued at nearly $8 billion, a staggering figure. Truth Social’s merger with a special-purpose-acquisition company, or SPAC, was predicted to net Trump at least $3 billion back in March owing to his sizable stake in the company.
But last month, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection to a payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels. The stock’s value dropped by 14 percent in the hours following the verdict but bounced back higher the following day, according to the New York Times. That trend has continued in the weeks since. The stock is known for its volatility, going for as little as $22.84 per share in April and as high as $79.38 shortly after its March debut, per USAToday. Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11.
The former tweeter-in-chief has stayed loyal to Truth Social even after Elon Musk reinstated his former account on X back in 2022, posting all of his campaign announcements and capitalized rants about his political rivals on the site. That’s in large part because Trump owns 114.75 million shares in the company, or a 64.9 percent stake, per Forbes, and he’s barred from selling any of them until September.
