Trump Is Selling Early Access to Social Media Posts. The Gambit Is Starting to Pay Off.

Alex Brandon/AP Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. The post-midterm business environment generally hasn’t been kind to Donald Trump’s technology ventures. But this week, the president’s social media firm finally did manage to report a bit of good news. On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its third-quarter revenue had grown by 200 percent, compared to the previous year. The impressive-sounding revenue increase comes primarily thanks to one new product: a service for high frequency traders on Wall Street that provides, for fees up to $100,000 per month, quicker access to Trump’s posts on Truth Social. (Technically, the service allows nearly instantaneous access to all posts, but the site’s struggling user numbers mean Trump’s missives are the main attraction for investors.) Despite that blockbuster increase, the bad news is that the company’s quarterly revenue was still only $3 million—of which $1.8 million came from the new service. Ad revenue saw a slight uptick but continues to languish at about $1 million per quarter. Those numbers are, by the metrics of other social media companies, really terrible. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for instance, reported more than $64 billion in overall revenue in the third quarter. It’s even terrible by the standards that Trump set for himself when he launched the company in 2021 as a response to being deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In a brochure created to entice investors at the time, Trump Media & Technology Group projected that by 2026, it would have about $3.6 billion in annual revenue. To be fair, most of that was not projected to come from Truth Social (which the company anticipated would have more than 81 million users by now, far above the recent estimates of about 6 million). The bulk of the revenue was supposed to come from streaming media content, which has largely not materialized. These days, the company largely exists as a repository for bitcoin—it holds more than 15,000 of them, valued at $1.1 billion—part of a strategy to build value through the rising price of crypto. That strategy worked fairly well until last year’s bitcoin crash, which caused the company to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in value. The price of bitcoin has partially recovered since August, helping Trump Media report almost half a billion dollars in additional gains from digital assets. The company has also cut costs—its legal expenses have plummeted as it settled a slew of older legal battles. But it still lost $26.5 million over the past three months, far outweighing its $3 million in revenue. But all of this is, apparently, a bit of a sideshow. The company has a merger pending with a nuclear fusion company that will go up for a shareholder vote next month. If it passes, the president’s social media company will likely pivot to being a nuclear power company, with a social media appendage.