Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. On Tuesday, November fifth, the day of the US election, Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of President elect Donald Trump's social media platform Truth Social, reported earnings for the third quarter between July one and September thirtieth. Its total revenue was just one million dollars, and it lost nearly twenty times that amount.
Only bringing in that much revenue during a quarter in the middle of election season at a social media network that you would think would be able to bring in revenue from political advertising is not good.
Tom Maloney covers wealth at Bloomberg, and he says that given the Trump Media and Technology Group's performance, what happened on the day after the election was pretty remarkable.
It was worth more than three billion before he was elected. On the night of the election, when it became clear that Trump was going to win, the stock was up more than sixty percent, and that added about two billion two He's net worth.
Since then, the company's stock price did another one to eighty and fell back to about where it was before the election. It was a whiplash moment that highlighted a new reality. As the US prepares for Trump's second term, in the White House. The President elects many businesses now stand to benefit from his return to power, but just how much. I'm David Gura and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, we go inside the businesses of Trump, from his meme stop to
crypto to real estate. How the president elect could cash in on his second term in office. Bloomberg's Tom Maloney spends a lot of time figuring out how rich billionaires actually are.
Sometimes it's relatively easy. If somebody you know is a founder of a publicly traded company, we know how many shares they own, we know what they do with them, we know the dividends they collect. Other times, they might have a private company and they don't want to share anything, and it's very tricky. So we look at, you know, how many widgets they sell a year, and try to
figure out what their revenue might be. We talk to people in the industry, we talk to people around them, and we try to get data that way and figure out what that company might be worth.
And Tom says, something that sets Donald Trump apart from the other billionaires he covers is how much of Trump's wealth is tied to his own image.
That's been the case for a long time. You know. Trump has always been somebody who's been very I guess cognizant of his personal brand and talked about the importance of his personal brand and how it related to his businesses. You know, you had things like the casinos, you had an airline, stuff like that, where he was trying to leverage the value of his name to build out these businesses, even going back to the night eighties and a lot
of the time that didn't turn out very successfully. And he did that again after he's kind of renewed popularity with The Apprentice, with things like Trump Fodguer and Trump's Stakes and Trump University.
The Trump Media and Technology Group is an extension of that strategy. The stock he owns of that company represents the biggest asset in his portfolio. He owns just over half its shares, and despite the company's losses and it having revenue of only a million dollars in the last quarter, it has a market cap of about six billion dollars because of how much the company's stock fluctuates. Though Tom says it's hard to say how much wealthier it'll make Trump.
It's not really clear that even with Trump in the White House, it's going to be any more successful. So it's kind of remains to be seen.
This is paper wealth. I mean, can he sell the stock? Is it something he's talked about transferring that that stock into cash.
He can sell it at this point, there was a long lock up period that's expired, so he can sell. He said he has no intention of doing that. And obviously, if you own that much of the stock and you start to sell, that's going to spook people and the price would presumably go down. So could he sell all of that overnight? No, probably not, but he could sell it. But you're right, it is kind of paperwork like it changes from day to day. It's an extremely volatile stock.
So let's move from the media property to crypto, which is another piece of Donald Trump's portfolio, something he's embraced after criticizing his promised to help the crypto industry. And Trump has a crypto project of his own. Where does that venture stand and how could Trump see his wealth increase by the actions he's expected to take when it comes to crypto.
Sure, so there are kind of two strands to the crypto thing for Trump. There are the NFTs, which are these kind of digital trading cards that he's been selling.
These are kind of like comic book style digital images of the president.
Am I right, Yeah, that's right. It's like Trump in various costumes, different poses. You know, he might have laser eyes, or he might be wearing you know, camo or carrying a gun, just various kind of almost comic book trading card type things that people out thereby.
In his most recent ethics disclosure, Trump says he's made more than seven million dollars selling his NFTs, and Tom says Trump's win makes them even more valuable.
If he'd lost, you'd have to think that those NFTs were not going to be worth anything and he was going to have more difficulties selling them in the future because he was kind of this he would be basically a two time loser, and I think he would have put a cloud over that business now that he's one, though, there's there's there's some future in it.
I think NFTs aren't the only digital asset Trump is involved with. He's also gotten into cryptocurrencies.
They haven't built a kind of operational business yet. He's really become a friend of crypto, the crypto industry, was a big backer of Trump in this election, a very
vocal supporter. He's spoke at crypto conferences, and a lot of crypto backers, people like the Winklevoss Twins, were supportive of Trump because he pledged to do things like get rid of Garry Gensler, the SEC head who was viewed as hostile to crypto, So that really they were an important part of the kind of coalition that got him elected, of the tech industry's support for Trump, and that could be an important part of his worth going forward.
Tom says he and his colleagues have concluded that Trump's NFTs and crypto ventures are too difficult to value, so they're not part of his five point seven billion dollar net worth as calculated by Bloomberg. It's easier comparatively to put a number on Trump's real estate holdings.
So there are kind of two in particular that I think are really interesting to watch. One is forty Wall Street, which is this nineteen twenties Art Deco building downtown. It's quite a beautiful building.
Right by the Stock Exchange.
Right by the Stock Exchange. It's lost a lot of tenants, especially over the last couple of years. It's not making enough money to cover its interest payments. It's only making about sixty percent of what it needs to cover its interest payments, So it's a money loser right now.
Trump doesn't own forty Wall Street outright. He has a ground lease on the property. And Tom says what Trump pays for that is about to change.
And that rent is going to go up really substantially in twenty thirty two, which you know, it's not making money now, it's going to make even less money than at least by the terms of that ground lease contract. So at some point I think that contract is going to need to be negotiated.
And Tom says winning the twenty twenty four presidential election is likely to give Trump more bargaining power.
The last thing I think another party is going to want is to be in some sort of public dispute with the president of the United States or litigation with the president of the United States. You know you're going to be trying to work out a solution.
And then, of course there's Trump Tower in Manhattan.
That building also has issues. It's got the commercial area downstairs. They don't have a lot of high profile tenants there anymore. It's not doing great the one they do have left is Gucci.
Gucci Trump Tower's most important retail tenant, renegotiated its lease to lock in a lower rent during the pandemic, but there could be issues there too. Tom says there have been signs the company has been looking to relocate when we come back. How Trump's growing list of liabilities, from conflicts of interest to his legal cases could affect his
businesses and his bank account. Bloomberg's Tom Maloney says that when Donald Trump left office in twenty twenty one, he used a different playbook than his predecessors.
Past presidents have benefited from these corporate ties, from this network that they build during the presidency, maybe by becoming a director at a company, or you know, getting donations to their charitable foundation or something like that, which is on a completely different scale from what we're talking about with Trump, who has, you know, real substantial businesses, isn't afraid to go out there and enter into agreements that might be seen as conflicts of interest. That is, obviously,
I think something that Trump isn't very concerned about. He's comfortable with the kind of political ramifications of those sort of deals, and it's a way that he can you know if he sees it as a way to make money to benefit his businesses. I don't think that he's going to generally walk away from those kind of transactions.
Sticking with the uniqueness of Donald Trump, we've seen presidents in the past take steps to protect themselves from potential conflicts of interest while they've been in office, to protect themselves from the appearance of conflicts of interest when they've been in office. Remind us what Donald Trump put in place back in twenty seventeen to do that, and what do you think the likelihood is that those structures are going to be in place this time around when he starts his second term.
So the first time around, Trump put his assets into a trust, he still obviously attracted a lot of criticism about various parts of his business, getting a lot of money from foreign sources and so on. This time around, Eric Trump has suggested they won't go to the same extent, but there is really no clarity about exactly what steps they're going to take to mitigate these conflicts of interest
this time around. So it's certainly something that people are going to be watching and looking at, especially with things like Trump media and technology. It's a publicly traded company. So you know, people have suggested that if groups wanted to win favor with Trump, they could simply invest in this company and boost the value of the stock and that boost Trump's personal fortune. We're just gonna have to
wait and see what happens there. There has been discussion about maybe it merging with Twitter with x, which is owned by Elon Musk. They haven't really commented on that, but that's you know, one of the theories is that maybe Musk is going to buy truth Social and that's why it should be considered valuable, but there's no real evidence that that's going there occur.
We've talked about one side of the balance sheet a lot. Those are the assets that he has and where he's making money. Where is he that what's weighing on that balance sheet, what's weighing on him financially certainly.
So you know, look, he's big liabilities at this point are the legal settlements. So he has hundreds of millions of dollars due in the defamation case with Nie Gene Carroll and also with the New York fraud case. Both of those settlements being held up on appeals and so on. So he hasn't had to pay that money out yet. He's had to pay a bond, but not all of
that money has been paid at this point. Now, coming into presidency, he's probably got the ability to string that out a bit longer, So it's positive for him on the liability side as well.
Where do you see this story going from here? What are you going to be watching for next.
We're certainly going to be watching how he deals with these conflicts of interest going up to his inauguration, what steps he's going to take to mitigate them, whether he's going to do anything with Trump Media and Technology. You know, he has a big stake in the company. Is he going to try to hold on to that? Is he going to put it into some sort of trust, give control to somebody else? And I think what's really interesting is coming into this administration, you're probably going to have
the richest cabinet that you've ever seen. Looking at some names that have been bandied around cabinet members and executive appointments, people like Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, Howard Lutnick, John Paulson, etc. So it's going to be really fascinating to see how they attempt to manage these conflicts of interests, what steps they take to you know, get out of their businesses at all, if they do any, and the tax implications of that as well.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode was produced by David Fox and Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards, Caitlin Kenny, and Brian Chapatta. It was mixed by Alex Sagura and fact checked by Adrian A. Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster.
Bor Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to Podcas asked it helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.