For the first time in almost 30 years, part of Donald Trump’s business empire has gone public. Trading started with a bang.

Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of struggling social media platform Truth Social, is began its long-delayed journey as a public company at Tuesday’s opening bell under the ticker symbol “DJT.”

The stock surged about 56% at the open, to $78, and trading was briefly halted for volatility. Trump Media shares have since stabilized at around $70, marking a 40% increase from Monday’s close.

Wall Street is assigning Trump Media an eye-popping valuation of around $13 billion — a price tag that experts warn is untethered to reality.

The skyrocketing share price comes despite the fact that Trump Media is burning through cash; piling up losses; and its main product, Truth Social, is losing users.

“This is a very unusual situation. The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, who has been studying initial public offerings (IPOs) for over 40 years.

  • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
    511·
    3 months ago

    It almost sounds like an in-power group of people who have a vested interest in other in-power people being able to leverage “value” of an asset to get out of trouble to then help the first group are artificially inflating the “value” of something they set.

    Twitter is valued at around $19B by Musk himself, and it has around 300 million users. Truth has 500,000 users. They have 1/600th the users and are valued at 2/3rd. They only generated $5M in revenue while losing $50M in costs. Twitter had roughly 200 times higher revenue, yet only 50% higher value. It’s insane how obviously wrong the valuation is. And the thing is, sometimes tech companies have seemingly high valuations when losing money but are still worth it because of the potential for growth… but where is the growth coming from for Truth? Ain’t nobody jumping from Twitter for Truth that hasn’t already. It’s not like there’s a huge boom of conservatives coming our way. If anything, Truth’s current trend of losing users will only continue with Threads coming online and other social media outlets.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
      27·
      3 months ago

      Twitter is valued at around $19B by Musk himself, and it has around 300 million users. Truth has 500,000 users.

      Someone needs to tweet this out at Musk. Point out that he is significantly more dumb than Trump and just let there egos flare…