Trump Media & Technology Group’s debut year on the market was less a stock chart than a political seismograph. By mid-October 2024, Newsweek reported, the Truth Social parent had gained nearly 60 percent from its $19.04 open on October 8, and on the Monday of that week the ticker DJT jumped 18 percent to a $29.95 close, continuing a climb that had begun with the month. That rally came with a memory: only weeks earlier, in September, the shares had touched a record-low $12.15.
The through-line was the November 5 election. Analysts read the rise as a wager on the candidate, not the company. “It’s really simple,” Matthew Tuttle of Tuttle Capital Management told CNN. “People realize that if Trump gets elected, this stock has the potential to do something,” he continued. “And if he doesn’t get elected, it probably goes to zero.” At the time, betting markets leaned toward Trump even as national polls gave Kamala Harris a slim two-point edge: the RealClearPolitics odds average put the Republican at a 53.9 percent chance of winning against Harris’s 44.9, with all seven swing states inside the margin of error.
The pattern had held all year. When Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in early June, TMTG slid almost 40 percent; when coverage turned sympathetic after the first assassination attempt in July, the stock leapt more than 60 percent to $50.14. His return to posting on X, a rival to Truth Social’s whole appeal, knocked it down again. Trump owned 57.3 percent of the company as of August 15, per the Associated Press, worth about $3.4 billion on a market cap near $6 billion, a long way from the $79.38 the shares fetched when the company went public in March 2024.
After Trump won, the seismograph kept shaking: Yahoo Finance described the shares as oscillating between highs and lows until the president-elect posted on Truth Social, on the Friday of that week, that he had “no intention” of selling, and the stock surged 15 percent, adding another 4 percent by Monday’s close around $33. At that level, Yahoo Finance calculated, the company was worth about $7.2 billion and Trump’s roughly 60 percent stake topped $4.3 billion. Short sellers got squeezed: S3 Partners put their mark-to-market losses at $22.2 million since November 4, and its analyst Ihor Dusaniwsky noted “we have been seeing short covering since the election with 1.26 million shares, worth $392 million, bought to cover since Nov. 4,” expecting more if the price pushed back toward its recent $51.51 high.
Underneath the swings, the business stayed thin. Third-quarter results, released just before the polls closed, showed a net loss of $19.25 million on revenue of $1.01 million, down from $1.07 million a year earlier, with nine-month revenue off 23%. For retail holders who bought the March peak, one post-election surge was never going to close a hole that deep; DJT’s price remained, as it had been all year, a bet on the man rather than the numbers.
Sources
- Trump Media Stock Soars as Election Odds Move in Ex-President’s Favor – Newsweek
- DJT stock continues rally after Trump announces 'no intention' to sell shares
