Trump's net worth plummets as DJT media stock suddenly tanks

Donald Trump's net worth has taken a nearly $2 billion dive as a result of his publicly traded media company floundering in the stock market over the last two days.

Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social and trades under ticker symbol DJT, dipped 11.7 percent to $35.34 on Thursday.

And that's on top of the 22 percent drop DJT shares saw on Wednesday.

The stock, which had previously risen more than 24 percent in the days after Trump's raucous rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden, essentially traded away all its gains and more.

As The New York Times has reported, drops in this often volatile stock hurt its 600,000 shareholders, many of whom are average folks who support Trump's candidacy and use Truth Social. 

But it's Trump himself who routinely experiences the biggest swings in his net worth, since he owns a staggering 115 million shares of Trump Media.

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At DJT's intraday peak of $54.68 on Tuesday, the former president's stake was worth almost $6.3 billion.

Following the frenzied two-day sell off, that dropped to just over $4 billion.

It's not entirely clear what sparked this but DJT has attracted plenty of short sellers - in other words, those who believe the stock will go down.

Part of what spurred the stock's 200 percent growth throughout the majority of October is the fact that short sellers had to buy more shares to cover their losing bets, according to research group S3 Partners.

S3 Partners also pointed out that DJT's stock price somewhat mirrors the trajectory of the Trump's odds to win the presidency in betting markets.

Since Trump owns almost 60 percent of the company, if he decided to sell even a small portion of his stake, it would wreck the stock price and more importantly, the portfolios of his most ardent followers.

So when a provision barring him from selling his shares expired on September 19, he sought to reassure his fans by vowing he would not do so.

'A lot of people think the reason [DJT is] down is a lot of people think I'm going to sell, and if I sell, it's not going to be the same,' Trump said days before his lock-up period was set to end. 'But I have absolutely no intention of selling.'

Trump Media was formed weeks after he left the White House in January 2021, but it waited over three years before going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

The stock often closely tracks the positive and negative outcomes in Trump's business and political endeavors.

For instance, it dropped 9 percent immediately after he was found guilty in his hush money trial.

The stock plummeted by 21 percent in a single day of trading in April after financial filings revealed the company lost $58 million in 2023. 

Trump invested only a few million dollars at the company's inception, meaning that either way, he's done extraordinarily well for himself.

A Trump supporter named Greg Bowden, 66, who owns shares of Trump Media told The New York Times that Trump 'has no reason to sell.'

Bowden expressed this opinion in early September, when DJT stock was trading much lower than it is now.

On September 23, four days after Trump was technically allowed to sell DJT, the price hit $12.15.

At that point, Trump's stake would have been worth nearly $1.4 billion.

Trump's recent financial setback comes as millions of Americans show up to the polls ahead of Election Day either to return him to the Oval Office or pick his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris for the top job.

The final DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners national poll before Election Day showed Trump overtaking Harris by three percentage points. 

The poll of 1,000 likely voters, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent, shows that Trump is trending up, with the support of 49 percent to Harris' 46 percent.