The stock of failed former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social site skyrocketed in value this week, rising from $8.23 a share to $66.22 at the close of trading on Wednesday, boosting the value of Trump’s Media & Technology Group to a market value of $9.4 billion. Since Trump owns 58% of the company, that means he’s now worth $5.2 billion, at least on paper.
And therein lies the rub, according to New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Suzanne Craig, who explained on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that the Donald’s billionaire status is illusory and could plummet even quicker than it rose.
“It’s a very volatile and high-risk stock, so it could be anywhere from worth a lot more in six months to almost zero in six months, we don’t know,” she said.
The meteoric rise of Trump’s social media stock comes at a time when he’s desperate for money to pay massive defamation and fraud judgments against him, and Craig noted he may still not be able to raise the funds he needs to meet his court obligations.
“We don’t know where he’s going to get the money from. He said that he’s going to put up cash, but you can get cash from a lot of places.”
The disgraced ex-president might try to leverage his stock holdings into some sort of loan, but that also seems dicey, Craig explained.
“Who knows what [the shares] are going to be worth in six months. There is speculation he’ll get a loan off those shares. I don’t know who would lend him money on those, because you don’t know what it’s going to be worth down the road.”
