By The Financial District
Apr 22 min
Starting Tuesday, there’s a new company on the Nasdaq: Trump Media & Technology Group, which will trade under the stock ticker DJT. It stands for Donald John Trump.
Trump Entertainment Resorts, which traded under a new ticker — TRMP, lost $2 billion over five years and filed for bankruptcy a second time in 2009. I Photo: Matt A.J. / Matt Johnson Flickr
The company’s main product, Truth Social, was Trump’s quick and dirty solution to his ban on practically every mainstream social media app. It never made money, Allison Morrow and David Goldman reported for CNN.
While Trump Media may be new, its stock ticker is a throwback to Trump’s only other publicly traded company.
Trump bestowed the same initials on his Atlantic City casino business, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. It never turned a profit and ended up in bankruptcy in 2004, wiping out shareholders.
Trump’s company lost money every single year of its existence, putting it more than $600 million in the red, but between 1995 and 2004, Trump took home about $40 million in salary, bonuses, and options — not unusual for a CEO.
Trump’s stock holdings were wiped out in the bankruptcy.
But he continued to make millions of dollars from the company after it came out of bankruptcy, pocketing $6.1 million from the re-named Trump Entertainment Resorts, which traded under a new ticker — TRMP.
It lost $2 billion over five years and filed for bankruptcy a second time in 2009.
The new DJT is enjoying some market enthusiasm but a look at the fundamentals suggests the stock is wildly overvalued. Trump Media generated just $3.4 million of revenue through the first nine months of last year, according to SEC filings.
“The stock price is clearly a bubble,” Yale law professor Jonathan Macey told my colleague Matt Egan last week. “No rational investor would take the stock at face value, especially if they had to hold it for any length of time.”