Despite its being a less trafficked and less established platform, Donald Trump’s Truth Social has reportedly surpassed Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) in market valuation.
Whether this is because Truth Social is enjoying a boost from Trump’s polling or because Musk has utterly mismanaged X or because of some third factor, it’s not immediately clear. Still, many things can be true at once.
According to the Associated Press, the investment firm Fidelity now values Trump Media & Technology Group—which owns Truth Social—at $10 billion, and X Holdings at $9.4 billion. The AP notes that the former’s stock “tends to move more with Trump’s re-election odds than on its own profit prospects,” and (ominously) that it increased nearly 22 percent on Monday, then another 9 percent on Tuesday.
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The AP reports that TMTG’s current valuation also exceeds that of Match Group, owner of basically every dating app, and Hasbro, maker of Monopoly.
All of which feels surprising given the platform’s general aura of struggle. In its first year, Truth Social reportedly lost $73 million in net sales. In the quarter that ended on June 30, in which TMTG reportedly lost $16 million and reported a revenue of $836,900. This spring, the app seemed to be hemorrhaging users.
Now, The Guardian also suggests that its recent gains are connected to projections of a massive Trump victory by certain betting markets. Experts believe at least one of these is being manipulated, but then, pretty much all the polls show Trump locked in a dead heat with his opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris. So, sure, maybe all that explains the surge.
But at the same time, the AP also notes that when Musk acquired Twitter two years ago, it was valued at $44 billion. Surely there must be some relationship between the campaign of chaos Musk unleashed upon acquisition and the app’s vertiginous drop in value. (Even last October, X was valued at $19 billion).
Anyway, maybe Musk is perfectly fine with all this. The world’s richest man has shoveled more than $119 million into the Trump campaign’s furnace over the past few weeks. Nice for him to see that going to some kind of use?
