Category: Business

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Business Donald Trump The Trump Organization

Trump Org’s Failure To File Financial Documents Suggests The Company Is Collapsing: Report

Something much stranger than usual it taking place these days at the Trump Organization, which is owned and run by the failed former president and his three oldest children, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.

According to The Daily Beast, even though it’s March and Trump Org. is supposed to have already filed financial documents with a court-appointed overseer, the company has “…not provided a 2022 statement of financial condition to any third parties, and do not intend to do so.”

The disclosure about how the Trumps haven’t made any financial statements to banks or accounting firms was made in a Feb. 3 letter written by a retired judge tasked with babysitting the Trumps’ real estate empire, in a document that was made public in court filings last week.

The Trumps “have not provided a 2022 statement of financial condition to any third parties, and do not intend to do so,” Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge now in private practice, wrote to the state judge who appointed her.

What does that mean for the company? One of three things:

  • Trump Org. has fallen on hard financial times
  • The company has found a bank willing to do business despite a lack of financial transparency
  • The Trump Organization is lying

These are just any documents, either. They are a “statement of financial condition is a sensitive legal document that serves as a summary of a company’s assets and liabilities. But notably, it must also include disclosures describing how the numbers were put together.”

In other words, this isn’t something you don’t just blow off and still stay in business, mainly because no one wants to deal with such a secretive company that could well be on the verge of collapse.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a civil suit against the Trump Organization that is scheduled to go to trial in October. The disgraced ex-president is attempting to delay the trial and his daughter, Ivanka, has made recent court filings in which she claims she had no idea any illegal activity was taking place inside the company, a clear sign that she is is trying to distance herself from her father and his possibly illegal actions.

Categories
Business Elon Musk Social Media

Musk Lays Off Another 10% Of Employees As The Social Media Site Continues To Implode

Twitter CEO Elon Musk laid off another 200 employees over the weekend, including product managers and engineers tasked with keeping the social media site online.

HuffPost reports:

Dozens of employees at the social media giant wrote they found themselves locked out of the company’s email and internal message boards. The cuts ultimately impacted people on several important teams, including product managers and engineers that help keep Twitter online.

[…]

The layoffs amounted to about 10% of Twitter’s remaining 2,000 employees, The New York Times reported. The company had about 7,500 workers when Elon Musk acquired the platform in October.

Chief executive of Twitter payments Esther Crawford told The Verge she was one of those dismissed by Musk, along with Martijn de Kuijper, a senior product manager who founded the tool Revue, who noted:

“Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over.”

Ever since he paid $44 billion for Twitter last year, Musk has been looking for ways to increase profits at the site, but has so far not been unable to turn around its fading financial future.

Shortly after he took full control of Twitter, Musk also began reinstating banned accounts such as the one belonging to failed former president Donald Trump, who has yet to return to the platform and continues to communicate via his failing Truth Social site, which is reportedly desperate for investors who will agree to prop it up.

Musk’s embrace of COVID conspiracy theories and right-wing extremists has also hurt Twitter’s bottom line.

Categories
Business Donald Trump

‘Great Businessman’ Trump Lost Millions On Tech Stocks By Selling Too Soon: Report

For decades, Donald Trump has bragged about his great acumen in the world of business and high finance. He has even called himself a “great businessman” and remarked that he’s “really good” at business.

But as his tax returns show, he’s one of the worst businessmen on the face of the planet, and he’s always been failure at everything he’s attempted, be it Trump Steaks, Trump University, or Trump Airlines. Hell, he had to take a gig hosting “The Apprentice” just so he could have some steady income.

It turns out that Trump is also a loser when it comes to make good decisions about the stock market, with Newsweek reporting that he lost millions on tech stocks by dumping them too soon while other investors were making a mint by holding those same stocks.

According to his 2017 tax return, Trump and his wife Melania sold stock in six companies in early 2017, including the tech giants Apple and Microsoft.

As the charts below show, post-2017 both tech stocks rose sharply and peaked in 2021-22. Although both companies have seen their valuation fall recently, both are still far above the price that the Trumps sold at.

Both tech stocks were bought by the Trumps in October 2013, and both gained significantly. The Apple stock was bought for $481,505 and was sold for $833,118, making $351,613, a gain of 73 percent. The Microsoft stock was bought for $248,867, sold in 2017 for $464,558, and made the Trumps $215,691, an 87 percent gain.

If Trump had held the stocks instead of selling, he could have made significantly more money. $481,500 of Apple stock purchased in 2013 would now be worth $4,150,000, a total profit of $3,669,000. The Microsoft shares would now be valued at a little less than $2 million.

Why would anyone sell such valuable stocks so quickly? It could be that Trump needed some fast cash to keep another failing business of his afloat. Or it could be that he’s a complete idiot when it comes to the stock market and doesn’t understand the basic principle that every investor is told when they enter the market: Buy low, sell high.

Donald Trump is a great businessman? Yeah, right. And in his spare time he’s also a nuclear physicist.

 

Categories
Business Elon Musk Social Media

Elon Musk Has Become The First Person In History To Lose $200 Billion

Twitter and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is, according to some, a great businessman who has an uncanny knack for making money in any market.

But it appears that reputation is nothing but hype, as Musk has now become the first person in history to ever lose $200 billion of their net worth.

According to Bloomberg, Musk’s sudden reversal of fortune is tied to the decline of value in Tesla stock, which has been tanking in recent weeks.

Musk, 51, has seen his wealth plummet to $137 billion after Tesla shares tumbled in recent weeks, including an 11% drop on Tuesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune peaked at $340 billion on Nov. 4, 2021, and he remained the world’s richest person until he was overtaken this month by Bernard Arnault, the French tycoon behind luxury-goods powerhouse LVMH.

How bad are things for Tesla? The company is now offering deep discounts on its electric vehicles.

Now Tesla’s dominance in electric cars, the foundation of its lofty valuation,  is in jeopardy as competitors catch up. It’s offering US consumers a rare  $7,500 discount to take delivery of its two highest-volume models before year-end, while also reportedly reducing production at its Shanghai plant.

Oh, there’s also the matter of Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which has been beset with one problem after another since he took control in October.

But to hear Musk tell it, every problem he faces is someone else’s fault.

Musk, for his part, has dismissed concerns about Tesla and has repeatedly taken to Twitter to criticize the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates at the fastest pace in a generation. 

“Tesla is executing better than ever!” Musk tweeted on Dec. 16. “We don’t control the Federal Reserve. That is the real problem here.”

And in what may wind up being the biggest irony of all, Musk has also warned not to take on large amounts of debt in such an uncertain financial market, remarking on the All-In podcast:

“I would really advise people not to have margin debt in a volatile stock market and you know, from a cash standpoint, keep powder dry. You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market.”

Too bad he didn’t follow his own advice.

 

Categories
Business Donald Trump

Value Of Trump’s ‘Digital Trading Cards’ Collapses – Down 78% In One Week

 

When he released them in mid-December, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump’s digital trading cards sold out in a single day for $99 each, netting the failed ex-president $4.4 million. Not bad for a so-called “investment” that actually carries no real value whatsoever.

As Forbes noted at the time:

Former President Donald Trump’s line of digital trading cards sold out in a day, netting millions despite the massive ongoing slump in nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrency and a fair bit of mocking from some of his allies.

Sounds like a major success for the “great businessman,” right?

But as it turns out with nearly everything that carries the now tainted Trump name, those cards have lost 78% of their value in a week’s time.

Finbold.com reports the bottom has indeed fallen out of the Trump trading card market, meaning lots of the owners how have almost worthless holdings that are likely to be worth nothing in the near future.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s non-fungible token (NFT) collection, known as Trump Digital Trading Cards, are currently owned by a total of 15,075 owners, which equates to a 34% unique owner rate.

The value of the recently launched NFT line dropped by 78% as the floor price fell from 0.84 Ethereum (ETH) on December 18 to 0.186 ETH, according to OpenSea data as of December 30.

Many of the cards were resold after the first run, driving up their value to a high of 0.82 ether, or $999. In the last week, the volume is 380 ETH down (-95%), sales are 1,564 (-93%), and the floor price is down -11%, however, in total each card has still gained significant value since they were first sold.

Much like other digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, the market seems to be in complete freefall, with owners trying to dump them as quickly as possible.

A few days after its release, the floor price began to drop in tandem with widespread criticism of the NFT line for issues including internal minting, licensing errors, and claimed design copying. It is worth reminding that Trump wasn’t always this open to the cryptocurrency sector, the former president referred to Bitcoin (BTC) as a ‘scam,’ stating that he didn’t like it “because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” 

The biggest scam of all, of course, is believing anything Donald Trump says.