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Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a successful businessman. Well, if he says so, it must be the truth. Speaking of… his Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), which operates the Truth Social website, reported a loss of $327.6 million in the first quarter of this year against revenue of $770,500.
That’s not $770 million dollars, which would still be behind Twitter’s first-quarter revenue, but rather seven hundred, seventy thousand, five hundred dollars.
Forget about the massive loss, which isn’t about operating costs but rather non-cash expenses that were related to the company’s merger. That means that Truth Social is going to lose a lot less money in the second quarter… probably just a few million dollars.
No, what’s jaw-dropping is that the platform makes virtually no money.
TMTG announced that most of this revenue was generated by “the Company’s nascent advertising initiative, which will continue to evolve as TMTG implements its vision.”
Sounds nice.
There is just one problem: A year ago, Truth Social made more money from ads. But maybe nobody at the company knows what “nascent” means.
Also, unless TMTG’s “vision” is to lose millions of dollars annually, it’s not clear what that statement was referring to.
To put these earnings in perspective, and to show how anemic they really are, let’s see what it takes to make this kind of money… and what you can buy with it.
Let’s say you run a single Starbucks. Not a franchise or the entire company, just one location that is open from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. And let’s also assume that you only sell pumpkin spice lattes at $7 a pop.
To generate comparable revenue, you would have to sell 80 drinks an hour. Difficult, sure? Impossible with a couple of cash registers? Absolutely not.
The point is that TMTG’s performance is abysmal… especially if you take away the money the My Pillow Guy is apparently spending on Truth Social advertising.
Any decent small business can probably match the sales of Trump’s media platform.
And, of course, you have to pay the bills.
Although Trump is known for stiffing the people who work for him, let’s assume that the 30+ employees of Truth Social want or need money. If there were no other operating expenses, each of them would only make about $20,000 per year on average.
However, we know that former Rep. Devin Nunes, who “runs” the platform, earned $750,000 per year in 2022 and 2023.
That would only leave a few dollars per month for everybody else.
Finally, $770,000 doesn’t buy you a lot.
For example, did you know that you could only pay off six porn stars with whom you had affairs to make sure they don’t talk to the press? At least that was the going rate in 2016. With “Bidenflation,” who knows what the average cost for that is these days.
