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Shares in Donald Trump’s social media company fell after the president opened the door to selling his entire $2.3bn stake, just as global investors were bracing themselves for his “liberation day” tariffs.
Shares in Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates Truth Social, fell 7.4 per cent on Wednesday after the company said in a filing with regulators that it planned to sell more than 142mn shares.
The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late on Tuesday showed that Trump’s 114mn shares are included in the sale, which will take place “from time to time in one or more offerings”. The stake is worth about $2.3bn and held in a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr.
Existing shareholders including the president, US attorney-general Pam Bondi, TMTG chair Devin Nunes and a Cayman Islands-registered company called Yorkville will seek to sell a total of 134mn shares, the filing shows. TMTG also plans to issue 8.4mn new shares.
In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday morning, Trump Media denied its securities filing was “paving the way for the Trump trust to sell its shares”. It described the prospectus as a “routine filing”.
Shares in TMTG, which trades under the ticker DJT, have plunged more than 40 per cent this year amid a US stock market sell-off fuelled by the president’s aggressive trade agenda and concerns that the levies on some of America’s key trading partners will weigh on the world’s largest economy.
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Later on Wednesday, which he has dubbed “liberation day”, Trump will announce his new “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign countries in a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House.
In September, DJT surged after Trump said he did not plan to sell any of his own shares in the company. Trading in the stock was temporarily halted by Nasdaq later that day.
Trump later accused Nasdaq of “taking orders from” the SEC. Writing on Truth Social, the president said at the time: “What right do [Nasdaq] have to do this? They have done it twice today. What’s going on?”
Earlier this week TMTG became the first group to list on the New York Stock Exchange’s Texas platform, though its primary listing will remain on Nasdaq.
The stock had become a popular way for individual investors to show their support for the president, despite TMTG reporting a net loss of $19.2mn in the third quarter. In October, the company said it had approximately 650,000 shareholders “with a unique profile overwhelmingly comprising retail investors”.
“Only roughly 2,100 investors owned more than 5,000 shares, and fewer than 1,000 investors owned more than 10,000 shares,” the company said.
