Trump Media & Technology Group, whose flagship product is social networking site Truth Social, will begin trading on the Nasdaq stock market on Tuesday.
Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp, a publicly traded shell company, approved a deal to merge with Donald Trump’s media business in a Friday vote.
In midday trading, shares of Digital World soared nearly 22% to 45.10 dollars.
The former president is set to own most of the combined company — or nearly 79 million shares. Multiply that by Digital World’s closing stock price Friday of 36.94 dollars, and the total value of his stake could be nearly three billion dollars.
Mr Trump has promoted Truth Social on the platform itself — on Friday he posted “I love Truth Social.”
Mr Trump will not be able to cash out the deal’s windfall immediately, unless the company’s board makes changes to a “lock-up” provision that prevents company insiders from selling newly issued shares for six months.
The former president was in New York on Monday attending a hearing on his criminal hush money case. Elsewhere, a New York appeals court reduced his 454 million dollars civil fraud judgment to 175 million dollars if he puts up that amount within 10 days.
Truth Social launched in February 2022, one year after Mr Trump was banned from major social platforms including Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
He has since been reinstated to both but has stuck with Truth Social.
Trump Media has not so far disclosed Truth Social’s user numbers but now that the company is publicly traded, more information will be disclosed.
Research firm Similarweb estimates that it had roughly five million active mobile and web users in February. That is far below TikTok’s more than two billion and Facebook’s three billion — but still higher than other “alt-tech” rivals like Parler, which has been offline for nearly a year but is planning a comeback, or Gettr, which had fewer than two million visitors in February.
Trump Media lost 49 million dollars in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just 3.4 million dollars in revenue and had to pay 37.7 million dollars in interest expenses.
The common stock of Trump Media & Technology Group will trade under the ticker symbol “DJT”.
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