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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   29960 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Part of what may be inflating the stock price is the fact it's so expensive and risky to bet against it. shorting is close to impossible due to restrictions and borrow costs; put options absurdly expensive.

i believe Truth Social is profitable as a business and that these $19 million losses are due to one-time expenses, like legal fees . this is under: "Other general and administrative (G&A)"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/08/12/trump-media-truth-social-stock-price/74768174007/

most of those losses due to the development of the streaming service and legal expenses, which is not too bad.

According to the USA Today article you linked Truth Social had $8.3M in legal expenses and $3.1M in technology expenses for its streaming service. Assuming both of these go to 0 that still leaves them with ~$8M in losses against 800k in revenue. Do you think Truth Social increased it's revenue 10x in the last three months? Did they reduce a bunch of other costs by 90%?

But it's not like they are going to developing a new streaming platform every quarter, or have to pay the same legal expenses every quarter. The streaming platform is is the second unveiling since Truth Social , which is already 2 years old. The legal expenses are related to Trump Media's merger, which is also not a recurring expense. If this were $19 million in advertising to promote Truth Social, then this would be a much worse situation, as it's understood to be recurring. Similar newly-public tech companies such as Twitter and Uber also had large legal expenses after going public, but these proved temporary even if a big deal at the time.

One might note that Twitter was bought to the moon on similarly dismal fundamentals year after year -- until the nasssty Musksises dropped a tonne of cash on it of course.

Evidence that Twitter's fundamentals were "similarly dismal?" As of Twitter's last 10Q they were reporting $1.2B in revenue against $1.5B of expenses for a net loss in the $300M range. I think having expenses that are around 25% higher than revenue is pretty different from having expenses that are 1000-2000% (10-20x) higher than revenue, as DJT reports.

I'm thinking more of the early stages -- note that even at the end they were losing quite a lot of money and yet people were still investing for some reason. I'd think that the people investing in TrumpCo also have some analagous reason.

"Losing money" is not, by itself, what I object to. Approximately every company loses money in some quarters. Even billions of dollars. It's the scale of the loss relative to incoming revenue. If you look at Twitter's first 10K after going public you will see there was only one year (2011) in which their losses are more than double their revenue. If you look at their first 10Q after going public you will see they were actually profitable that quarter! Meanwhile DJT is posting losses on the order of 10-20x revenue. As far back as I can find data for Twitter, they were not posting losses like that.

And yet DJT only lost $10-20M -- people were quite happy to buy Twitter when it was burning hundreds of millions.

If (for instance) you think that Truth Social might become 'Right Wing Twitter', getting in early would be a smart move. (not investment advice lol)

But X is already right wing Twitter

Not really, you just got used to the pre-Musk censorship regime.

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