William Simpson
Former President Donald Trump is now $1.8 billion richer.
Trump’s wealth boost is due to his new public company, Trump Media & Technology Group, whose main asset is the social media platform Truth Social. The company awarded Trump an additional 36 million shares as an “earnings” bonus for shares that were above $17.50 per share on any 20 trading days within a 30-day trading period, according to a Tuesday statement. regulatory filing.
With the stock bonus, Trump now controls 114.75 million shares of Trump Media, which trades under the ticker DJT – the same as his initials. Based on today’s closing price of the company, this values its entire stake at $5.7 billion.
Trump’s total net worth is about $8 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Indexwho says most of his fortune is now tied up in DJT shares.
The value of Trump’s stake in DJT has been hurt by a recent rise in the stock’s value. Since going public in late March, Trump Media has been on a bumpy road, with shares initially rising to a peak of $79.38 per share, followed by a weeks-long slide that spurred CEO Devin Nunes to accuse some investors of manipulating shares through an illegal type of short selling.
But since last Monday, shares have risen 43%, recovering some of the lost ground. Shares on Tuesday rose $3.24, or 7%, to $49.93.
Still, Trump won’t be able to cash in on his new wealth anytime soon. This is due to a so-called lock-up period that restricts him and other Trump Media executives from selling their shares for another five months. Lockups are common in newly listed companies because they prevent insiders from selling their stakes soon after a company goes public, which could cause the share value to plummet.
The additional stock grant means that Trump now owns about 65% of Trump Media & Technology Group, a company that is in the red and reported revenue of just $4.1 million last year.
But many of Trump Media’s shareholders are small investors who support the former president, with Nunes telling Fox Business that the company has about 600,000 retail investors. At Truth Social, some of them celebrated Trump’s new shareholding, predicting it could put pressure on short sellers, who are traders who bet that a stock’s value will fall.
“Prezz and company just played them like a fiddle,” wrote one supporter on Truth, with a screenshot of an alert about the gain.
