With the glow of owning the cult leader’s new stock wearing off and institutional investors nowhere to be found, Donald Trump took a hit of more than $1 billion in “paper value” after the Trump Media and Technology Group stock fell more than 21% in Monday trading.
The owner of 78.5 million shares, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee say his eponymous company drop more than thirteen points on Monday, closing at $48.66, a loss of $1.044 billion. Overall, the NASDAQ Composite closed up 0.11%, at 16,396.83 on Monday. Of course, Trump’s wealth with this stock is vapor: the true value of his shares is what someone is willing to pay Trump for them, and when he has his fire sale to raise cash, the value will plummet.
It also didn’t help that the company’s previous auditor–who was dismissed last week after the company debuted on the NASDAQ exchange–wrote in an SEC filing, “[T]he Company has incurred and expects to incur significant cost in pursuit of its acquisition plans. These factors raise a substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” The report, released Saturday, was filed after the merger with the “blank check” company DWAC was complete.
The new stock, with the ticker symbol “DJT,” seems poised to follow the path of the last stock to carry that symbol, the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, which was delisted when it declared bankruptcy in 2004 after running up $600 million ($986 million in today’s dollars) in debt.