Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/22/trump-media-shares-fall-after-it-posts-300m-loss-for-first-quarter.html
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Something about fools and their money springs to mind. No clue why, must be a random neuron firing.
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I’m imagining the tax write-offs coming next year. 
Can I hope every executive involved will be audited? 
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I love that for them
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But how on Earth does such a thing lose hundreds of millions of dollars every few months?
Incompetence. Theft. Nepotism. The hallmarks of the company’s namesake.
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That is a burn rate of almost $4 million per day. (5 million/day if you just count weekdays). Last I heard the headcount was under 50 people.
I can’t imagine how so few could spend so much.
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As someone said in an earlier thread, it’s grifts within grifts. Truth Social is probably paying inflated prices to shell companies owned by insiders for hosting, software development, IT security, moderation and anything else that can be turned into an outsourced service.
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And lets throw in some shady Bitcoin to make it grifts within grifts within even more grifts:
DJT Stock Holds Steady. Trump’s Campaign Is Now Accepting Bitcoin Donations.
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/djt-stock-trump-bitcoin-e4d32d24?mod=search_headline
eta:
The bit about the stock “holds steady” is attributed to Barron’s take. It’s still falling today but DJT stock is still up 36% over the past month.
Fools.
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The only ones that will be hurt by this are the low level MAGA fools and their families. These true believers are getting conned and loving every minute of it.
My guess is they think buying DJT stock is supporting their messiah with the upside of making some money. If they lose their money, they were going to give it away anyway, so in their enfeebled minds, it’s win-win.
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Huh, 60 million dollars loss a year to almost 330 million loss per quarter.
Quite easily. It seems that, like before, the money is mostly going to “liabilities,” previously the debt incurred in setting up the company (i.e. gift to Trump and his cronies), and now presumably the additional debt added by the media holding company buying (sorry, “merging” with) Trump media. This suggests every quarter will see similar losses, so they’ll lose more than a billion dollars a year on less than four million dollars of revenue (which will probably decline, if anything).
It couldn’t be any clearer that all the money put into the company has been an attempt to channel money to Trump and his cronies. That there’s anyone out there who can’t see what a transparent scam it is…
The entire company exists as a financial crime, so yeah, I hope they only start with that.
In some ways, the opposite - it has high losses because of a crazy amount of debt; it has a crazy amount of debt because of (multiple rounds of) insane amounts of money being pumped into what is essentially a fake company (with a figleaf social media service to make it look legit). If no one goes to jail for this, it’s actually a sign of competence.
The company is a stack of grifts, but these aren’t running costs, mostly. (Even hugely inflated, they couldn’t get that high.) It’s paying off debts, which are a completely different set of scams…
Until they realize their retirement investment is worthless… I really think a bunch of MAGAts really believe this is a real business worth a lot of money that they’ll get rich investing in. (There are also cynical investors just looking to make money by selling to true believers.) I frequently see interviews at his rallies where people say they think he’s a brilliant businessman who wants to make them rich too. Trump followers may know there’s a con, but they always think they’re in on it.
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and some will still think so after losing their savings. 
they’ll likely blame the irs, or the fbi, dark brandon… i think it’s hard to deprogram once you’ve invested ( emotionally, financially ) your identity in someone else they way they have. and it will be very difficult for them to admit they were wrong this whole time
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To put those revenues in context, the average McDonalds in the US does $3.5 million in business each year.
By my back of the envelope calculations, Trump Media’s revenue per share (rounded to the nearest cent) was $0.00.
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Functionally, it’s just a way to give him money.
This is really the only reason the stock price is above $0.01, right? I mean, besides the shares owned by him and his family, which he plans to cash out the second he can, most of the other shares have to be owned by MAGAnaughts certain that it will all come up roses for them at some point in the future.
As soon as he cashes out, the stock will bottom out.
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Absolutely this. If you set up a social media service and it costs you $650/year for every active user (TS supposedly has 2M active users), then you’re technically incompetent, and if you do so without a plan to make a significant fraction of those costs back in revenue, then you’re financially incompetent. While incompetence is a good baseline assumption when considering the people around Trump, this is extreme even for them. (For comparison, in 2022 mastodon.social’s running costs were around EUR150K, for 117,000 active users, so say $2/user).
The explanation, as @GagHalfrunt says, is that interested parties – including but not limited to Trump – are sucking money out of it by creative accounting and self-dealing. I would not be in the least surprised if there’s some actual bonafide money-laundering going on too.
Of course, the point of Truth Social was never to be a successful business. The goal was to create a vehicle that would take in money from investors and transfer it to Trump and the founders of the service, via the SPAC mechanism. At this it seems to have been fairly successful. And that also explains why they don’t need to try too hard to make any revenue. Making money from the business isn’t the point; bilking the investors is.
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I don’t think the Saudis and Russians who are pumping the stock are fools. They know what they are buying and what they can expect in return.
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Still not low enough.
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Oh yeah - even after they’ve been scammed, the MAGAts still think they’re in on it. They just don’t blame Trump for their misfortune (in being scammed in the thing they knew was a scam). They’ll blame Biden* when they lose their money, for somehow sabotaging a fake company. They never admit they (and Trump) were wrong.
*And/or whoever the next Democratic president is, after him. It won’t matter that the timelines make no sense - they blame Obama for lack of response after 9/11, after all.
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Most likely the SEC, but that may be part of the design, tRump can cry prosecution and use that as another fundraiser and entrench his cult/investors/victims. Being able to tie cult/investors money loss to a government action may radicalize and promote more stochastic terrorism.
Putin’s tRump psyop has such a long trail of returns.
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it loses money on paper to shield income from any actual money making Trump enterprise. I have to assume there’s at least one of those - possibly bible sales?
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