Trump’s Social Media Company Just Keeps Losing Money

Mark Peterson/Pool Photo via AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social stock might be doing better these days, but the company is still struggling to make money. In the first three months of 2024, it pulled in just $770,000 in advertising revenue. To put that in some context, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, earned more revenue in just three minutes, on its way to making $36.4 billion in revenue over three months.

Truth Social posted those dismal revenue numbers in a public stock filing on Monday, but as anemic as the revenue numbers are, they aren’t even an improvement from last year. Despite all of Trump’s bluster and the publicity from finally going public, the platform actually saw it’s ad revenues drop from the same period last year, when the company reportedly earned a not-much-better $1.1 million in ad revenue.

The new filing also revealed that the company, which went public in March, lost about $13.1 million from first quarter operations, a dramatic uptick from last year’s $3.6 million. And that’s just the cost of doing business—when the company factored in the cost of going public and distributing shares to people who were owed pieces of the venture, it actually lost $327.6 million in the first three months of the year. It still has about $274 million in cash to play with, but none of this is a good sign for the company’s future.

The company’s current stock price would indicate a value of nearly $6 billion, of which Trump personally controls about $4 billion. That valuation seems hard to square with the company’s revenues, which currently amount to less than the sales at an average Chick-Fil-A franchise. On Monday, following the release of its new financial data, the stock price fell by roughly 9 percent by mid-afternoon.

The long-term outlook for the share price is particularly important for Trump, who cannot cash his shares out until September—six months from the stock going public—and so the value of his stake in the company is entirely theoretical, at least for now.