It’s been a month and a bit since I last wrote about the stock price / market cap, yes, yes, different ways to express the same thing, of the stock of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., aka DJT. Last time we peeked in at this soap opera of a company, their only real product is its primary stock holder, President Trump, and perhaps the social media site, Truth Social, they provide. Their primary competition, due to similar styles, is the Elon Musk-owned X, née Twitter, with other social media, such as Facebook, being secondary competition due to differing styles of social media or, in the case of BlueSky, having lower profiles. X’s main draw seems to be transitioning from its style to its owner, incidentally, but I do not use X, so I cannot be authoritative.
The stock price of DJT five weeks ago was $39/share, roughly.
It’s been a month of the Presidency for President Trump, during which he’s drunkenly, metaphorically speaking, fired Executive Branch employees. Probationary employees come in great numbers and are least protected, so they’ve been fired first, but inspectors general, who are tasked with finding corruption and mistakes, and are thus a huge threat to a lifelong conman, have also been a favorite target. He hired the aforementioned Mr Musk to search computer systems for signs of corruption and waste, which are the lodestones[] of the political right.
Mr Musk has been notably prolix on the topic, but reportedly inaccurate. The media and, hopefully, everyone else has learned not to take Mr Musk’s pronouncements seriously.
One could credibly argue that President Trump is executing on many of his promises, although there are notable exceptions, such as admitting that inflation is not an easy demon to slay; he’s taken to blaming the previous Administration for necessary consequences of his own actions.
So what, if anything, has this meant for DJT? Is it skyrocketing in response to him keeping some promises?
This is the month Yahoo! Financial view of DJT, and so we can see DJT is down 21%; if we do the math for more than a month, $39 to $28, it’s more of a 28% drop. DJT has not been good to its buyers, but very good to its shorters. A $28/sh price translates to a market cap of $6 billion+.
So what’s happened? That’s always speculative, isn’t it? BlueSky’s profile has elevated in the last month, as it gains national media mentions. Incidentally, several of my friends, long-time (35+ years) social media users, have announced they are leaving X and Facebook for BlueSky. At the risk of sounding, well, old, this same sort of thing was happening forty years ago: Manage a site so that the users cannot trust the managers to treat them fairly, and, at some point, the herd picks up tents and moves to a different site. The “moat” that business analysts often discuss is quite fragile when it comes to social media, with threats from within (enshittification) and without (troll attacks).
Between the two threats, you have to wonder if all social media sites are going to become body farms, and we’ll all go back to interacting in Real Life. I presume Truth Social will remain popular, to the extent that it is, only so long as President Trump remains popular. At some point, its population will consist only of the top-level parasites who don’t understand why everyone else left. DJT will become worthless.
But that’s not quite the point. How shall we read the goat entrails that is the chart, above? I suspect that at this point, the Trump fanbase, MAGA, has bought all the DJT they can afford; professional investors have evaluated DJT, classified it as having little future, and either are not buying it or are even shorting it. Amateur investors, seeing President Trump’s popularity beginning to slip, are not buying. See this CNN/Politics story on a recent Georgia townhall in which a Republican congressman had a cool reception. It’s tricky to evaluate such townhalls, since they’re easy to flood with partisans, but I thought it interesting.
DJT is in decay mode. That doesn’t mean it’ll continue to decay. If DJT’s parent company has a trick up its sleeve, or announcement of a business alliance, or some other bit of news, it could easily leap upwards. Alix Breeden on Daily Kos has a take on its future, and, as it’s informed by more research than I have time for, it may have some interest.
As ever, I’m not a financial advisor, I’m just a worn-out software engineer with 4 decades in social media, some of it technological, some of it as a user, some of it as an author, some of it as a manager (not commercial). Find yourself a financial advisor. This is just honest opinion on a social media site that has no interest in screwing you over.
