The merger that led to Trump Media shares becoming publicly traded is also paying off for top executives and other insiders at the company, which owns the Truth Social app regularly used by former President Donald Trump.
Corporate filings from Trump Media — which reported a net loss of $58 million last year on revenue of just $4.1 million — detail the salaries, retention bonuses and stock allocations for CEO Devin Nunes and other executives.
Trump himself is by far the biggest shareholder, with 78.75 million shares that give him a stake of nearly 58% of the social media company’s common stock.
The number of people financially rewarded in the early stages of the company is limited. Besides the former president, it includes the chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and several people close to Trump.
Trump Media began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker DJT — the former president’s initials — on March 26 following its merger with the shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp.
Trump could receive another 36 million in so-called earnout shares over the next three years, provided that Trump Media’s stock stays above certain benchmarks.
Those thresholds for the share price are well below where Trump Media stock was trading on Monday, when it closed at $37.17, down more than 8%.
“It sounds like more of a contract that you give to an executive than to a controlling shareholder,” said Kevin Murphy, a professor at the University of Southern California’s business and law schools, in an interview.
“The former president is not an executive of the company,” Murphy noted.
Murphy was also struck by details revealed in a 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing disclosed that Trump Media awarded company stock to Nunes, chief financial officer Phillip Juhan and chief operating officer Andrew Northwall.
Trump Media issued promissory notes, a type of legally binding IOUs, to the executives, at some point when it was still a…
Read the full article here
