Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Stock Gets WORST NEWS He TRIES TO CONCEAL

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Trump's Truth Social media platform is CRUMBLING, having lost $100 million PER MONTH while bringing in just $250,000 per month in ad revenue, AND paying Trump a BONUS of $1.8 BILLION based on the success of the pumped up, trumped up stock price. Michael Popok who worked on Wall Street, explains how Trump continues to dupe his investors by hiding the data from them about his company cratering. Go to https://WashingtonPost.com/LegalAF to subscribe for just 50 cents per week your first year. Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Join us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/legalaf Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Popak Legal AF, and it's time for me to take another look at Trump Truth Social Media and how poorly it is performing this micro blogging platform, which only has revenue from ad sales, is struggling to hold on to its dwindling US user base. And if you can't grow your user base when you're owned by Donald Trump, when he gets nonstop media attention, then you're never going to do it. In fact, people that follow revenue sales for platforms like this would question, how are you ever going to survive

if your revenue is generated from ad sales and you don't have an engaged growing user base. How bad is it? Let's put it this way. In just one month period, the daily users for Donald Trump during the height of his criminal prosecutions, when he was on TV every moment, and in social media every moment, dropped 21%.

It's down 35% since March. The daily active users that even bother to use his platform is about 76,000 people, not millions, thousands people, which is down from 124,000 back with it, you know, less than a year ago. So they've cut effectively their user base in half and their total monthly views is about four million, four million monthly visits to their site.

Let me put this in perspective. I do a fair amount of work on YouTube, and I get 10 times the amount of views as Truth Social does in any given month. Me, Michael Popak. But my market cap is not $8 billion, which is what the market cap for Trump is. That's, I mean, once again, we're reinforcing as all of Wall Street and every analyst, that Trump stock is a meme stock. It's like DojaCoin. It's not tied to any fundamental economics at all.

In fact, if you were going to tie their economics to anything, it would be to a bankruptcy filing. This is not a company, if it didn't have the Trump name, it wasn't being propped up by his supporters to the tune of $8 billion market value, which is ridiculous. I mean, it's as big as Western Union right now. Let me tell you what its real numbers are. Any other company would have gone bankrupt,

would have filed for bankruptcy, just like all the other Donald Trump entities. In the first quarter alone, its net loss. Get ready for this number. Remember when I said it was 76,000 daily users? The next number I'm going to give you is in the millions. $328 million quarterly loss for the first quarter, right? First quarter of this year against revenue of $771,000. So for a three month period, it brought in about $250,000 a month against a hundred million dollars of loss per month.

Okay, think about that for a minute. You have a company that brings in revenue, revenue of about $250,000 a month against losses of over $100 million a month. Does this company survive? What is the economic purpose of this company? Now, despite the fact that the stock is propped up by these followers and supporters of Donald Trump and other people who are trying to game the system, trying to make money much like many of the cryptocurrency out there, this is like a cryptocurrency stock. You also have another issue that the truth Social is lying outright to its users and to its investors.

It says it purposely doesn't track key metrics about its user base, how long they visit, when they visit, how many times they visit, monthly views. For a company that only makes money from ad sales. Ad sales are only tied to engagement and size of your audience. Engagement and size of your audience are the two biggest drivers of algorithms for ad sales if you're gonna be an ad sale based microblogging platform,

which is all that they are right now. You can't put them in the same class of, you know, like X or TikTok or Facebook, you know, they're not even on the same planet. So if you're based on ad sales and you have these numbers, you would think you'd wanna be telling your investors about how you're doing with the ratings. How many people visit?

What's their monthly engagement? How long are they staying? How sticky is the content? The loss of daily users. No, they've decided, Donald Trump and his organization have decided not to reveal any of those statistics to their investors because they find it to be, it wouldn't accurately reflect their financial picture. You know what accurately reflects their financial picture? A $300 million loss in the first quarter.

And yet, they found a way just to show you that Donald Trump is not for the little guy, if you thought that before, is not for his investors, is not for his voters. That company awarded Donald Trump a bonus. And I'm gonna tell you why. They awarded him a bonus of another 1.8 billion, with a B, dollars worth of stock,

bringing his total holding to almost $6 billion. Why? Because the stock price, which started at $10, and is currently in the 60s, it was above $17.50 for 20 consecutive trading days. Hooray! I put all the people that bought it 30, 40, 50, and $60. And just because it stayed $17.50

for 20 consecutive trading days, boom, Donald Trump got a $1.8 billion bonus. of the Washington Post since, well, all the president's men have me wanting to be a journalist and work in a newsroom. This podcast is sponsored by the Washington Post. It just so happens that I was reading the digital version of the paper today to get me ready for some of my hot takes. And I found particularly fascinating an article by two of my favorite writers, Hannah Knowles and Marianne Levine about Republicans flocking to see and be seen

at the Trump trial in New York. In a rush and need to catch up quickly on the day's most important and interesting stories, The Post's The 7 newsletter is a quick commute read sent each weekday morning and it's also available as a podcast. I even signed up to get the Posts For You newsletter, which sends me my very own personalized roundup of stories every evening, based on my interest in reading history.

Their app makes it easy for me to stay up to date on the latest news, save and share stories, and follow my favorite authors. Did you know the Post offers a cool feature for audio lovers like you? You can actually listen to articles in addition to reading them, so you can tackle your to-do list while catching up on the news at the same time. You name it, the Washington Post covers it.

From climate and culture to crosswords and cooking, the Washington Post helps you discover a world of surprising stories, important insights, and actionable advice. From May 21st to June 3rd, you can go to washingtonpost.com slash Legal AF to subscribe for just 25 cents per week for your first year. That's 90% off their typical offer, so this is truly a steal.

Once again, that's washingtonpost.com backslash legal AF to subscribe for just 25 cents per week for your first year. Now listen, if you happen to listen to this ad after June 3rd, know that we still have an amazing 50 cents per week offer just for our podcast listeners. I mean, let's look at this. This is a company that has no other revenue stream other than through ad sales.

It has a dwindling user base at this. This is a company that has no other revenue stream other than through ad sales. It has a dwindling user base. At this rate, in another three or four months, they're going to be down to nothing. I get more views for a hot take than they do. Literally, I get more views. I'll get more views for this hot take and buy a lot than the daily average users for Donald Trump. I haven't gotten 76,000 views for one of my hot takes ever. Okay, all right. So I will beat that number, watch it, you help me.

I'll beat that number by at least six or seven times by the time this is all said and done. I'm just using it, I'm not bragging, I'm just using this as a comparison to show you how poorly the Trump media organization is performing, how they know they're performing poorly and refuse to reveal the key statistics to its investors or to its users and has hundreds and hundreds

of millions of dollars of loss in a quarter where it barely brought in any money whatsoever. I mean, when you're underwater $300 million after one quarter, I mean, you've got to close up the shop or change your model. Here's a quote from somebody who does follow statistics about users and websites and that kind of thing. David Carr from SimilarWeb, who's an editor of Insights, News, and Research, who follows platforms like Donald Trump's said the following after

he heard the numbers and saw the numbers. If you can't demonstrate that you have a sizable, active, engaged, growing audience, I don't understand how you create a successful ad-supported social media business. Right. That's the problem. That's the problem. That's why they're always teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. They reveal that in their various filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And their investors who are basically investing in a meme stock where there's no fundamental economics behind it don't care. That's why they're gonna get crushed by the short sellers eventually. You'll catch up with them. And they'll get crushed as Donald Trump eventually gets around to having to sell his stock. Right now, he's propping the stock up, but he's holding on. It's like a dam with a sizable amount of water. Picture the Hoover Dam,

and behind it is a sizable amount of water that's being held by Donald Trump. Until that dam breaks and he starts selling that stock because he needs to replenish his coffers. What do you think happens to the stock price? I assure you, the fundamentals of stock pricing will kick in and that stock will drop as Donald Trump sells a billion dollars worth of stock. And just another example, for those that are trying to elect Donald Trump

because they think they need a successful businessman in the White House, despite his four years and the chaos that he created and so there. Think again. Donald Trump is not a successful businessman. He's a successful con artist. He's the PT Barnum of our generation. There is a sucker board every minute and they apparently are voting for Trump and donating to him and propping up his meme stock.

But if you want a successful business person, I'll give you five or 10 names of titans of industry who have run successfully Fortune 50, Fortune 10 companies, who might be decent at being president one day, but they're not named Donald Trump, who's used things like the grift on the apprentice, meme stock, selling sneakers out of the back of a van, selling the suit off his back when he was arraigned

in little pieces in NFTs, selling NFTs. You mean Joe Biden's selling a non-fungible token with a piece of his suit when he was inaugurated on it? Come on. Bibles, sneakers, suits. What does that tell you? That's a man who's desperate. You know, if you follow Shark Tank, you see Mark Cuban doing that? You see Mr. Wonderful doing that? No. You see legitimate billionaires hawking goods the way that Donald Trump does out of the back of a van? No. Do you see them having companies like this? You know, this is the same Amazon.

When Jeff Bezos, you know, had suffered, you know, a couple hundred million dollars in losses the first few years, he had a real business model behind it. Selling books to the masses and then selling everything to the masses. That survived. That did well. This is not going to survive. That's why Donald Trump has already moved over to TikTok. The same TikTok he tried to ban several times as president because he thought the Chinese government owned it and it would be an intelligence breach if he did it. He's now on TikTok and supporting TikTok because some of his donors and supporters own shares and support TikTok. So he's moved over in order to use it. If he's using that, then he's not using Truth Social.

And if he's not using Truth Social, nobody, no one else is either. And that's what we're trying to follow here on the Midas Touch Network. We have to continue to talk about the Trump Media Technology Group, DJT stock symbol. I'm not promoting it. I'm just telling you how to avoid it for your portfolio. And so I'm gonna continue to do my analysis. I used to work in financial services. I was a global head of litigation

for a financial services firm on Wall Street. I sort of know how these things work. I don't wanna bring them to you right here exclusively on the Midas Touch Network. And on Legal AF, now you know why we call it that. We named it that four years ago for a reason. Come on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Join me on Wednesdays when I'm with Karen Friedman

at Kniflo on Saturdays with my co-founder, Ben Mycelis. And then I do hot takes like this, I don't know, about every hour, right here on the Midas Touch Network. Slide over to YouTube, Midas Touch, free subscribe. Get them to three million. See, we're talking about millions now. Three million subscribers, right? Three million, not four million daily monthly users.

Three million subscribers. And you can do it. We're building the network with your help with our bare hands. And then you can slide it. We're building the network with your help with our bare hands. And then you can slide over to my stuff if you like what I'm doing as a contributor, Michael Popok playlists, Michael Popok contributor, full body of work there, 1200, 1300 hot takes, all of them better than the 76,000 daily active users for Trump social media. So until my hot take, until my next Legal AF,

this is Michael Popak reporting. Heary, heary, Legal AF Law Breakdown is now in session. Go beyond the headlines and get a deep dive into the important legal concepts you need to know and we discuss every day on Legal AF. Exclusive content you won't find anywhere else, all for the price of a couple of cups of coffee. Join us at patreon.com slash Legal AF. That's patreon.com slash Legal AF.