Donald Trump Media Dealt Blow Days Before Share Deadline

A Delaware judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s media company has breached an agreement with a company that helped set up his social media site, Truth Social.
Trump Media & Technology Group will now have to give more than half a million extra shares to investment company ARC Global.
Tuesday’s Delaware Court of Chancery ruling comes two days before ARC Global, Donald Trump and other Trump Media shareholders are legally permitted to sell their shares.
Several investors will likely wish to sell, as the company has lost billions of dollars in value since its launch in 2022.
Trump still owns 57 percent of the company, which controls social media site Truth Social, where Donald Trump posts messages to supporters and which promotes itself as a social media site without censorship of political ideas.
However, Delaware judge Lori Will said ARC Global, which helped Trump Media become a public company, was entitled to far fewer shares than it claimed in its submissions to the court. Will said Arc was entitled to about 8.19 million, far less than the 10 million it had claimed.
Noting that the companies would be free to sell their stock on Thursday, she ordered all parties to immediately work to release the stock to ARC “such that ARC can freely sell or transfer those shares upon the expiration of the contractual lockup.”
In August, Trump resumed posting on X, formerly Twitter, as Trump Media’s stock values fell. The former president had been banned on Twitter following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, but was reinstated shortly after Elon Musk purchased the company in late 2022.
In August, a quarterly financial report from Trump Media and Technology Group revealed that revenues had dropped 30 percent to $836,900 from 2023, with the company losing a total of $16.4 million during the quarter.
The company’s CEO Devin Nunes said in a statement at the time that the company plans to “explore numerous other possibilities for growth, including mergers and acquisitions,” having recently launched the streaming service “Truth+.”
Trump’s X account had shared nine new 2024 campaign-related posts on his first day back on Twitter. Before then, he had posted on the platform only once since his January 8, 2021 ban—sharing an image of his mug shot and a link to his campaign website after being indicted on felony election subversion charges in Fulton County, Georgia, in August 2023.
Newsweek reached out for comment to Trump’s office via email on Wednesday.
Truth Social, with an active user base that represents only a tiny fraction of the users active on X, has struggled to gain a competitive audience since it was launched in February 2022.