Donald Trump on Thursday defended his social media platform Truth Social as a growing chorus of critics — and short sellers — view its parent company as a meme stock with a vastly overinflated share price.
Trump, in two lengthy posts on Truth Social, accused the platform’s detractors of being “Radical Left Democrats” who are trying to convince others “that TRUTH is not such a big deal and doesn’t ‘get the word out’ as well as various others, which they know to be false.”
“I THINK TRUTH IS AMAZING!” Trump wrote, echoing a statement earlier this week from Devin Nunes, CEO of the app’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, that it has “no debt and over $200 million in the bank.”
“More importantly, it is the primary way I get the word out and, for better or worse, people want to hear what I have to say,” Trump wrote.
In addition to being a megaphone for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the platform is Trump’s path to a potentially massive financial windfall.
Trump owns 78.8 million shares of the company, a 57.3% stake worth more than $3.6 billion at the firm’s share price of $46 on Thursday morning. Trump has to wait until a six-month lockup period expires before he can sell any shares.
But it’s far from clear how the volatile stock will fare during that interval, and Trump Media’s long-term business plan has spurred scores of skeptics.
Trump Media has become by far the most expensive stock in the U.S. to sell short, according to data firm S3 Partners. The annual financing costs required to borrow DJT shares to short were between 750% and 900% of the stock price as of Wednesday, S3 reported.
The company, trading under the stock ticker DJT after completing a lengthy public merger, shot up by as much as 50% in its Nasdaq debut last week. But the stock plunged by 21% on Monday, after the company reported a $58.2 million net loss on revenue of just $4.1 million in 2023.
DJT was down more than 5% as of 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. Still, the company…
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