La Jornada: Trump’s media company loses more than $1 billion

New York. US President Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology, has lost more than $1 billion since it started last year, and its earnings report, released on Monday for the three months ending June 30, showed another $238 million gone, although much of that was due to accounting losses from the falling value of its bitcoin holdings.

Trump Media & Technology – which owns the president’s social platform, Truth Social – has tested half a dozen new lines of business to boost its stock market shares and expanded into unrelated industries, such as online gambling, finance, investment funds, bitcoin purchasing and custody, as well as nuclear energy.

Since August 1, Truth Social has offered a special service, called Truth API, that grants quick access to Trump’s posts for a fee.

In a conference call with investors, the company’s new CEO, Kevin McGurn, indicated that several high-frequency trading firms had already signed up, each paying between $60,000 and $100,000 a month.

And he announced that the firm will reverse much of its expansion and redouble its commitment to its original media business, through the sale of a form of access to the White House, a measure that has generated major ethics questions among Democrats and groups that oversee the government.

Wall Street traders can make money by getting news from the White House faster, and that’s why they’re signing up – 10 in the week since the service began – which translates into a big boost for the company. Collectively, monthly customers are paying up to $7 million a month and $12 million a year, two to three times the revenue the company earned from all of its business last year.

Despite those gains, investors are still not convinced that Trump Media has a bright future. The company depends in part on external financing and although the president attracts a lot of users of the platform – he has 13 million followers – it is not clear how many will read his publications after he leaves office, and even less so why operators would pay up to 1.2 million dollars a year in advance of his publications if he will no longer have power and will no longer be able to make government decisions.