Trump Media Spirals as 36 Percent Dive From Debut Erases Billions

More from the article...

... The social media company that's mostly owned by former president Donald Trump has slumped 37% from its close on March 26. The stock fell below the level it was trading at on March 22, when investors approved its tie-up with the blank-check firm, Digital World Acquisition Corp.

Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, had soared in its first days as a public company after the private firm merged with DWAC, what the shell company was known as.

But the stock, which trades under Trump's initials DJT, has struggled to retain the attention of individual investors who bought shares as a way to support the former president in his 2024 reelection campaign.

As the stock slides, the paper windfall for Trump himself has dropped some $1.6 billion to roughly $2.9 billion. For Trump to benefit from the paper wealth, he'll have to wait six months before he can sell shares under a lock-up agreement. ...

... The accounting firm picked to audit Donald Trump's social media venture has had repeated run-ins with regulators and faced criticism for its failure to live up to professional standards in the US and Canada, according to a review of public filings.

BF Borgers has become one of the most prolific auditors of US public companies just 15 years after its foundation, and regulators have warned that it has taken on new clients faster than it can manage. ...

"The firm significantly increased its number of issuer audit clients...without a corresponding increase in the number of firm partners," the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the US audit regulator, wrote in a stinging report in 2022.

The PCAOB criticised the "tone at the top" of the firm and said Borgers' management "lacks the necessary commitment to undertake only those engagements that it can reasonably expect will be completed with professional competence".

The report concluded: "Leadership does not appear to be sufficiently balancing firm growth with ensuring audit quality." ...

[more about the firm at the link]

@#17 ... There's been something fishy about this whole merger and public offering right from the beginning. ...

Yup.

IPOs do not usually generate court cases.

Trump Media Co-Founders Sue Company, Alleging a Scheme to Dilute Shares (February 2024)
news.spacconference.com

... The co-founders of former president Donald Trump's media company filed a lawsuit, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ...

Why Trump's Social Media Company is Awash in Legal Cases
news.spacconference.com

... Donald Trump's newly public social media company is entangled in many legal cases, the bulk of them involving suspected misdeeds by the executives who helped set up the company and merge it with a public entity " and by the former president himself, Bloomberg reports.

It all started with Truth Social, the right-wing social platform launched by Trump in 2021 after he was banned by Twitter and other sites for encouraging violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Trump Media & Technology Group was formed with a mission to counter the "liberal media" and Big Tech firms that "silence opposing voices."

Trump has sued two co-founders of Trump Media & Technology, claiming they set the company up improperly and shouldn't get any stock in it.

In the latest legal skirmish over who gets how much of the hot but flailing meme stock, Trump alleges that Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss violated an agreement about the setup and don't deserve their 8.6% stake, currently valued at $606 million. ...

Why do folk involved with fmr Pres Trump seem to wind up in court for one reason or another?