By most traditional measures, Trump Media’s valuation is inordinately high. The company took in just $3.3 million in revenue during the first nine months of last year, all from advertising on Truth Social, and recorded a loss of $49 million.
That means Trump Media’s market value is more than 1,000 times its estimated annual revenue. Investors sometimes assign lofty valuations to small, money-losing companies in anticipation of rapid growth — or a belief that other investors will continue to bid up a company’s shares, for whatever reason — but typically not on this scale.
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"The valuation of the business is rich relative to its underlying fundamentals, but I would not get in front of it in the near term," said Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital.
"This valuation may be more of a proxy on the enthusiasm of supporters for Trump than a reasonable estimate of underlying business prospects."
TMTG was the third-biggest percentage gainer across U.S. exchanges at 11:54 a.m. ET, according to LSEG data. Retail trader-focused social media and trading platform Stocktwits listed it as the most trending stock.
Shares of blank-check firm Digital World Acquisition Corp, which is now TMTG, had surged more than 35% on Monday after completing its merger.
While a 2016 Washington Post review found that Trump made over $44 million, the company — Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts — lost more than $1 billion and ended up in bankruptcy.
This time around, there’s at least one similarity between the two ventures separated by decades. The newly merged company that’s set to go public, Trump Media, will be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the letters DJT, Trump’s initials. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts used the same stock ticker when it went public with great fanfare in 1995.
“It’s going public and we’re really very happy about it,” Trump told reporters almost 30 years ago. “It’s going to be a great day.”
The Atlantic City, New Jersey, company lost money every year, but its stock prices did well — for a time. In the initial public offering, the company raised $140 million, selling 10 million shares at $14 each.
By 1996, the stock reached a high of $35 a share before plummeting later that year, in part because the company bought another casino for $100 million more than its estimated $400 million value, The New York Times reported in 2016.
The company, meanwhile, kept bleeding cash. The year the stock peaked, it lost $66 million. In 1999, it lost $134 million. And in 2004 — when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange — it lost $191 million, according to a CNBC review.
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