CNN host Kasie Hunt and her morning show laughed out loud at former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social stock taking a dive — and dropping Trump’s paper wealth by $1 billion in the process.
The newly-merged Trump Media and Technology (DJT) company began trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange last week, and immediately shot up in initial trading. But Monday saw the stock sharply fall after some negative financial disclosures — closing off 21.47%.
On Tuesday morning’s edition of CNN This Morning, Hunt opened a rollicking segment on the debacle with a clip of Jimmy Fallon joking that Trump “is so broke he:
KASIE HUNT: All right, let’s go now to this.
JIMMY FALLON: Speaking of Truth Social, the company’s stock is plunging after it was reported that last year it lost $58 million. Truth Social stock tanked so fast, they’re changing the name to Twitter.
As a result of the stock tanking, Trump’s net worth dropped $2 billion. Trump’s so panicked he’s now selling copies of the Torah.
KASIE HUNT: (laughs) Shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, plunged yesterday after a new SEC filing revealed the company lost more than $58 million in 2023. That compared to a $50.5 million profit in 2022.
Donald Trump, who owns a majority of the newly public company, saw his own net worth tumble by more than $1 billion on paper. I don’t think–. How many Torahs would you have to sell?
(laughter)
SARAH FISCHER: A lot of Torahs!
KASIE HUNT: Two– two billion dollars!
JONAH GOLDBERG: Larger than the Jewish market alone. Let’s just put it that way.
KASIE HUNT: Sara Fischer, can you help us understand? I mean, what the valuation is here and, like, look, the stock market. No, I’m not a business reporter. You know a lot more about this than I do. I think for average voters, it’s clear that sometimes the market will reward companies that are losing money because there’s a promise of return in the future.
They’re making a bet that this is going to be successful. Is that what’s going on with Truth Social, or is something else going on with Truth Social? Because I guess I struggle to see how like, this changes. (laughs)
SARAH FISCHER: You’re exactly right. This is what we would call a meme stock, which is where its financials are completely divorced from its market, valuation.
The way, you know, it’s a meme stock. When you look at other social media companies that have gone public. And we have a great proxy in Reddit, which went public just two weeks ago, you have a lot of a user base, and that’s what the promises. So even if they’re not making money, you think that eventually they will because so many people use the product.
And look, it’s not unusual for social media companies to go public and not make money. Snapchat has still never posted a full profitable year in terms of EBITDA. Twitter, in its nine years of being public, had only two profitable years. So this is not unusual.
But what’s unusual is that they’re not revealing user metrics, right? Normally tech companies are screaming to the mountaintops to investors. Look how many people love our product. Nothing was revealed there.
And they’re also not revealing much about their business strategy. And so I think right now you have a lot of momentum from what we call retail investors, right? Fans who want to buy into the stock. But are institutional investors, big banks going to continue to back the stock. Absolutely not. And that’s why when they did finally revealed these losses for 2023, a lot of went was pulled out of the sails.
Watch above via CNN This Morning.
