NEW YORK — For all the debate about just how rich former President Donald Trump is, one thing is clear: His ownership stake in Trump Media & Technology Group makes him a billionaire.
The company behind the Truth Social platform is worth more than $3.5 billion on Wall Street, and Trump owns more than half of it. So far, Trump and other insiders in the company known as TMTG have been unable to cash in because a “lock-up agreement” has prevented them from selling any of their shares since TMTG began trading publicly in March.
Trump’s lock-up deal looks set to expire later this week. But if he sells, Trump risks sending a negative signal to other shareholders and prompting them to dump their shares. For now, Trump says he’s not selling.
Here’s a look at what the end of the lock-up could mean and what Truth Social actually does:
Trump on Thursday will be free to start selling his shares of TMTG as long as they don’t close below $12 before then. They closed Friday at nearly $18.
Trump entered into the lock-up agreement in March, when TMTG merged with a shell company named Digital World Acquisition Corp. and took its place on the Nasdaq stock market.
Trump does not run TMTG. Its CEO is Devin Nunes, the former Republican U.S. Representative from California. But Trump is the biggest draw for its Truth Social network, posting his “truths” on the social-media platform.
Trump owned 57.3% of all the company’s shares, as of Aug. 15. Based on the company’s total market value of nearly $3.6 billion coming into the week, that made Trump’s stake worth a little more than $2 billion.
Trump launched Truth Social, in February 2022, after he was banned from major sites such as Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He’s since been reinstated to both — and endorsed by X owner Elon Musk — but he still mostly posts on his own platform.
While the platform sought to capitalize on the outrage over Trump’s social media bans to attract a broad audience, Truth Social, much like fellow right-leaning social media platforms Gettr and Parler, has not been able to move much beyond an echo chamber of conservative political commentary.
Truth Social is marketed as the antidote to mainstream social media apps, which Trump and his supporters say discriminate against their views and limit free expression, said Roxana Muenster, a doctoral student at Cornell University who studies the far-right and digital…
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