On the campaign trail, former president Donald Trump talks frequently about what a great businessman and a great investor he is. But one topic he doesn’t discuss is the collective $1 billion-plus of losses suffered by people who invested in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. The company, whose stock trades on the Nasdaq with the symbol DJT, owns Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media site where he posts his thoughts, day in and day out. 

On March 26, Trump Media’s first day as a public company, its stock closed at $57.99 a share, after trading as high as $79.38. But Friday, the stock closed down at $26.21, and after the trading day ended, the company reported a $16.4 million second-quarter loss and just $837,000 of operating revenue, down 30% compared to the same period last year.  

On Monday, the stock tumbled again, down to $24.88. That’s a 57% drop from its first-day closing price and a 69% drop from its first-day high. 

Anyone who bought the stock at its initial market price—or at pretty much any point along the way—and still holds it has likely been thwacked. Monday’s closing price of DJT was its second-lowest close since Trump Media stock began trading.

It’s extremely difficult to calculate the precise losses that investors other than Trump have seen on their 75 million DJT shares—the share count has shifted and grown as the company issued more stock. But the more than $30 per share drop in DJT’s price since its first day of trading have likely inflicted more than $1 billion of losses on shareholders other than Trump. 

During the period that Trump Media has been public, the S&P 500 Index, the standard market metric, was up 2.7%. That’s not a fabulous return—but it’s a lot better than a 57% or 69% decline. In other words, any investor who bought Trump Media stock at or near its launch date would have been vastly better off owning an S&P 500 index fund than owning a piece of DJT.

And those losses have likely been borne largely by Trump fans who wanted to own stock in a company named for him and that he controls. Trump Media’s price appears to be based primarily on shareholders’ belief in Trump, not on projected profits or revenues. (Although the company reports it has $344 million of cash and equivalents—and no debt, which presumably gives it staying power.) It’s doubtful that serious professional investors have put significant money into DJT stock, which was wildly overpriced when it debuted in March and still seems overpriced by any rational market metric. 

In contrast, Donald Trump himself has done fabulously well with DJT stock. As I noted back in April, Trump stood to get another 36 million shares at no cost to himself because the company’s stock price hadn’t totally tanked. He got that bonus stock on May 1, bringing his total holdings to 114.75 million shares. At Monday’s closing price, his stake was worth $2.85 billion.

Yes, Trump’s stake used to be worth lots more than it’s worth now. And yes, he in effect traded Truth Social in return for his shares, which I guess you can consider an expense of sorts. But having a smaller paper profit on stock that essentially appeared out of nowhere for no cash outlay and seemingly minimal effort is not the same as losing money that you shelled out to buy stock in the open market.

So my sympathies are not with Trump. They’re with Trump followers who have gotten their heads handed to them (in the financial sense) by investing in a company controlled by someone they believe in.  

Will Monday’s glitch-delayed conversation between Trump and Elon Musk on X, marking Trump’s return to a platform vastly broader than Trump Social, help boost DJT’s stock price? Does Trump spending more than two hours on X last night mean that DJT’s prime asset—having Trump post on it exclusively—will become less valuable? 

DJT stock was down slightly on Tuesday in midday trading. It promises to be another “interesting” day for Trump Media shareholders not named Trump.