Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which owns former President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social—went public on Friday, then popped on the stock market this week. Stock in the company as of Thursday afternoon is hovering over $60 per share, up 40% from its opening price at the beginning of the week.
The stock market surge means that members of the company’s board, which is filled with allies of the former president, are now holding highly valued stock that could make them millionaires if they sell.
And the former president's cut could be even bigger.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, who is now Trump Media & Technology Group’s CEO, was transferred 115,000 shares of stock in the new company following the merger. With shares of the stock trading at over $60 as of this writing, Nunes’ stake is around $7 million. In 2018, Open Secrets reported that Nunes’ net worth was $223,002, with most of his investments in the alcoholic beverages industry.
Nunes' long-term bet on Trump appears to have paid off. In Congress, as part of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes adamantly defended Trump against charges of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and worked to expose what he believed was illicit Democratic surveillance of the Trump campaign.
Nunes isn’t the only member of the board whose net worth has ballooned with the company’s new valuation, according to publicly filed documents.
Eric Swider, who is director of TMTG, picked up 10,100 shares under his own name, as well as 143,043 shares indirectly through another company. Those shares are worth just under $10 million now.
Other members of the board include Kashyap Patel, a top aide to Nunes in the House who also worked for Trump’s White House; Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer; a former Louisiana prosecutor named W. Kyle Green; Trump’s Small Business Administration boss Linda McMahon (of WWE fame); and Trump’s son, Donald J. Trump, Jr.
As of Thursday, none have filed any documents revealing what, if any, stake they have in the company.
Those high share prices are also good news for Trump given his imminent need to raise money in recent weeks. Trump needs hundreds of millions of dollars to secure a bond so he can appeal a civil fraud trial that he lost in New York. Trump was fined a whopping $464 million plus interest for “blatant” fraud in “vastly inflating the value of his core real estate assets” in loan applications.
The bond Trump needs to post was recently reduced to $175 million.
Most bond issuers don’t take real estate as collateral, meaning Trump would have to sell his properties to raise the money, his lawyers argued, according to the Financial Times.
But Trump owns over 60% of Trump Media, reported the New York Times, which is now valued at something around $4.6 billion.
And while the terms of the merger prevent major shareholders from selling off for at least six months, or using the stock as collateral for loans, the board can waive those restrictions if Trump asked them.
Which he may need to, very soon.
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