The publicly traded social media company owned mostly by former President Donald Trump staged a minor rally Tuesday in a rocky final trading session ahead of polls closing.
Trump appears at his rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan early Tuesday.
Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, traded under the ticker $DJT in reference to Trump’s initials, rose as much as 18.6% to $40.74 by early afternoon, tacking on more than $600 million to Trump’s net worth at the time.
But the stock suffered a steep decline in late afternoon trading, turning negative and briefly getting halted before recovering to a 5% gain to about $36 per share, equating to a roughly $210 million paper gain for Trump.
Trump’s social media nest egg now accounts for $4.1 billion of his $6.2 billion net worth, making him the 531st-richest person in the world, according to Forbes’ estimates.
The stock of the Truth Social social media site parent has gained about 95% over the last month.
Trump owns 57.3% of his namesake company, which began trading as an independent firm in March upon the completion of a yearslong reverse merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company. Experts largely consider Trump Media a meme stock, meaning its share price can fluctuate wildly, with movements often not a reflection of the company’s underlying financial performance like other stocks. The firm’s sales are a fraction of its social media peers, with Trump Media’s $1.6 million in revenue over the first six months of 2024 far smaller than Snap’s $2.4 billion and Reddit’s $520 million over the period. Though Trump Media’s $8 billion market capitalization is less than half of Reddit and Snap’s $20 billion respective valuation, the Truth Social parent trades at an exponentially higher premium than its competitors based on revenue, with its 3,996 price-to-sales ratio dwarfing Reddit’s 20 P/S ratio and Snap’s 4 P/S ratio, a metric which compares a company’s market value to its revenue over its four most recent quarters.
Trump Media’s share price has moved closely in the direction of the betting market’s odds of a Trump victory, a rally viewed as a vote of confidence in Trump to win the election. The stock traded at $16.50 per share a month ago when Trump’s odds on the Polymarket betting platform stood at 49%, and more than doubled as his betting odds climbed to over 60%.