Trump-supporting retirees have gone all-in on investing in Trump Media, even as the stock has proven to be volatile.
One user, who only goes by @DTLjohnny, said on Trump Media-owned Truth Social he sunk 98% of his total retirement into the stock. As of September, he estimated he had lost 60% of his investment. Nevertheless, he seemed confident in the company’s ability to right its sails.
“But I knew this day would come when the Deep State crooks would become so desperate that they would shove all-in with their counterfeit shares. Everybody can see what they’re doing. And I believe this is part of the plan of full exposure,” the user wrote in September. “And there ain’t no way Trump’s letting them bankrupt his company! Have faith. He and [Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes] have a plan. But it’s a plan that they have to keep secret…for now.”
He likely recouped a big chunk of his losses. Shares soared more than 300% from a late-September low to late-October high but have since retreated about 40%.
Another investor expressed concern about the stock. John Viaud, a South Carolina retiree, said his “entire pension is in jeopardy” after losing $600,000 on investments in Trump Media.
“If we don’t see a green day tomorrow I may need to bail,” he said in a Truth Social post in September.
In a separate post, Truth Social chastised the Washington Post’s previous coverage of investors who lost money on Trump Media stock, saying the outlet came to “preconceived conclusions” and omitted Trump Media’s full critique of the story’s content.
Viaud, responding to Truth Social’s criticism of the Post story, said he continued to invest in Trump Media and he was able to mostly recover his loss “due to the success of the companies [sic] stock performance.”
Fortune was unable to independently verify the Truth Social users’ investment portfolios. The users did not respond to Fortune’s interview requests, and Trump Media did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Persistent backing of Trump’s media and technology company has become a way for Trump’s followers to show their fervent support for the president-elect. But these retirees who were do-or-die on Trump Media prior to the election are in for a tough wake-up call if they’re still pouring funds into the stock after Trump’s Nov. 5 triumph. Despite a 6% boost for the stock the day after the election, share prices have since fallen 13%, erasing the earlier gain.
The stock followed the pattern of a larger “Trump bump” of stock explosions shortly after the election—which helped the S&P 500 gain 3.5% in the second week of November, its best post-election session ever—but has since mellowed.
Trump Media has always been volatile. It’s lost more than 53% of its value since March 26, which marked its first day trading as a public company after its special purpose acquisition company merger. To further spook investors, executives like CFO Phillip Juhan and company director Eric Swider have sold a combined 536,000 shares of the company since the election. Trump himself has said he won’t sell his stock, remaining its largest shareholder with 54% ownership, worth about $3.2 billion.
Trump’s victory paradox
Trump Media’s rocky path since the election indicates Trump’s victory hasn’t solved the stock’s volatility or Truth Social’s financials.
According to recent filings, Trump Media is hemorrhaging money, largely because Truth Social’s conservative usership remains narrow and because its main source of revenue is advertising dollars, which totaled just $2.6 million in the first nine months of the year and were down 23% from a year ago. The company lost $363 million in the same period. Trump Media is now considering creating a cryptocurrency payment platform called TruthFi, which would act as another revenue source.
Trump’s Truth Social was originally started in early 2022 as a way for Trump to platform his ideas after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But Elon Musk’s X—which has 70.4 monthly active users to Truth Social’s 698,000 as of September, according to Similarweb—has become a hotbed for spreading conservative ideology since Musk bought the app in October 2022. Trump returned to the platform in August 2023. With an alliance between the two sites speculated to be in the works, Truth Social’s value proposition as an amplifier for Trump and his followers has weakened.
“Trump Media’s whole argument was: We’re going to allow freedom of expression in a way that hasn’t existed in years,” Mike Stegemoller, a Baylor University finance professor, told the Washington Post.
Trump’s return to the presidency—and an international platform carefully watched by global leaders, followers, and opponents, alike—further diminishes the appeal of an app built specifically to provide a voice for him.
“That doesn’t bode well for a company that already makes very little revenue,” Stegemoller said.
Credit: fortune.com
