Measuring value
Let’s assume, for a second, that Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. is a normal company whose stock should be judged by the merits of any other normal stock. With that in mind, let’s examine some of the financial fundamentals.
In case you need to get up to speed, TMTG (as I’ll call it) is the parent company of Truth Social, the social network founded in 2021 by Donald Trump. In October 2021, it agreed to merge into Digital World Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company.
Blank-check companies — or SPACs, as they are also known — enjoyed a brief moment back in 2021 as a way for companies to go public without much scrutiny of their finances. They simply merged into publicly traded firms with no operations that were sitting on a big pile of cash that investors had more or less blindly trusted the board to invest wisely.
On Tuesday, TMTG became a public company after its merger was finally approved last week. And when the shares started trading in New York with the ticker DJT, they jumped 42% to $70.90. That valued the company at $9.6 billion. By the close of regular trading, the shares had come back down to $57.99, which added about $650 million to Trump’s net worth because of his ownership stake, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Which brings us to the fundamentals. Based on that opening share price, TMTG is likely valued at more than 2,000 times annual revenue — taking the reported $3.4 million in nine-month sales and estimating for the year. Now, tech companies are often afforded generous valuations based on the assumption of rapid growth and the promise of future riches – or at least they were before interest rates increased.
But let’s put that multiple of sales in some context: Nvidia Corp., the hit stock of the artificial intelligence revolution, is valued at just 38 times sales. When the preeminent social media platform of the past two decades, Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms Inc.) went public in 2012, it was valued at 12.5 times revenue. The only similar point of comparison that springs to mind is Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, which at the time had little revenue to speak of, for $19 billion in 2014.
WhatsApp did, of course, have a lot of users, though. About 450 million, at the time. TMTG doesn’t actually report the number of active users, though it said in a January regulatory filing that it has had “9.0 million signups for Truth Social via iOS, Android and the web.” Generously, each of those users is therefore afforded $1,067 in value. Meta is currently valued at $422 per monthly active Facebook user. It’s highly likely, however, that only a fraction of the signups to Truth Social use the app anything like monthly.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsl...s-into-account