Donald Trump's appearance on X Monday night should deeply concern a surprising group of people, a Slate analyst argues — his shareholders.
Alex Kirshner Tuesday rang the alarm bell over Trump's return to X after he made his first post on the platform in a year, and then appeared for a livestream with Elon Musk on Monday. It's just a month before a six-month lockup policy on his Trump Media shares expires.
"Trump spent Monday providing free publicity for the main competitor of his publicly traded social media company," Kirshner writes. "[He] looks ready to absolutely decimate Truth Social investors."
Trump Media, the eponymous parent company of the former president's Twitter-adjacent site Truth Social, lost 5 percent of its value Monday and continued to trend down Tuesday morning, the Slate analyst reports.
"Apparently it is not good for confidence in a business when the majority owner of that business spends his time propping up a direct competitor that provided the entire basis for the owner’s copycat business," Kirchner writes.
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Kirshner notes the interview took place as Trump Media reported a $16 million loss, bringing in less than $1 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2024, but argued it didn't really matter.
"Trump Media is not an actual business with a real path to making money," he writes. "It is instead a place for the former president to post freely before a friendly audience while converting the enthusiasm of some of his biggest fans into enterprise value for himself."
The Slate analyst argued Truth Social has just one asset propping up its $5 billion value: its association and access to Trump, who owns 57.6 percent of its stock.
"To the extent there is any business case for Trump Media, it is that Truth Social is the one where Donald Trump personally hangs out, and thus it is the one where his monetizable fanbase hangs out," writes Kirshner.
"Trump returning to X blows up that idea."
Trump's decision to return to X undercuts the access draw Truth Social provided and creates serious risk to investors now seeing the former president openly boast about the traffic he sent his competitor's way, Kirshner argues.
In late September, a temporary ban preventing Trump from selling off his $2 billion stake will end, and it remains unclear how he will respond.
But one possibility could spell doom for investors, Kirshner writes.
"Trump could begin selling shares this fall, using his ownership of this spectacular money-losing venture to redistribute money from his investors’ pockets to his own," writes Kirshner.
"Trump owns so many shares that selling them would invariably push the price way down, but he could still make many millions or billions of dollars if he offloaded his shares at the right time."
