Former president Donald Trump’s social-media company Trump Media reported a $16.4 million loss and less than $1 million of quarterly revenue, showing that the business’s financials remain tentative following a public debut earlier this year.
Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the social-media platform Truth Social, said Friday the company earned $837,000 in revenue for the second quarter, while shelling out millions of dollars of legal expenses associated with its stock market listing.
Trump has relied heavily on Truth Social in his presidential campaign, where he posts frequently to his 7.5 million followers. He began using the platform after his Twitter account was suspended in 2021.
The poor financial results, laid out in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, don’t come as a surprise. In April, Trump Media said it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock plunging more than 21 percent in one day. The company flagged then that more losses might be ahead as it sought to expand its user base.
Trump Media debuted to fanfare on the Nasdaq exchange in March under the stock market ticker DJT — Trump’s initials — with the company’s initial valuation set at more than $8 billion. Company executives called Truth Social a “safe harbor for free expression amid increasingly harsh censorship by Big Tech corporations.”
But Trump Media has yet to realize revenues commensurate with the buzz. The company launched a TV streaming platform, Truth+, in August.
Trump Media said Friday that about half of its quarterly loss was due to $8.3 million in legal expenses, including costs associated with its merger with publicly listed Digital World Acquisition Corp. in March, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. That merger made Trump Media a listed company.
CEO Devin Nunes said in a statement Friday that the company was continuing to seek paths to growth, including acquisitions.
“From the beginning, it was our intention to make Truth Social an impenetrable beachhead of free speech, and by taking extraordinary steps to minimize our reliance on Big Tech, that is exactly what we are doing,” the former Republican member of Congress from California said.
The filing mentioned Trump’s popularity as a factor in the company’s future finances. “TMTG’s success depends in part on the popularity of our brand and the reputation and popularity of President Donald J. Trump,” it said. “The value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Donald J. Trump were to suffer.”
On Friday evening, Trump, who owns 59.9 percent of Trump Media’s common stock according to Friday’s filing, posted a video on Truth Social reporting that he had just landed in Montana for campaigning, without mentioning the company’s afternoon announcement.