Don’t Buy the “Shareholder Value” Line… DJT’s $400M Buyback Has More Layers Than an Onion

Back in the summer (last summer I mean), around the presidential campaign, Truth Social (ticker: DJT) was one of the most talked-about stocks in the market. It wasn’t just one of the meme stocks floating around on reddit boards… it was the meme stock. AMC and all the other names walked so DJT could rage-tweet. The only difference was that instead of Roaring Kitty and a WallStreetBets army, we had the entire Trump family.

You’d get stories like “DJT jumps 20% after Eric Trump says something wild on Truth Social” or “DJT falls 20% after Don Jr. says he’s taking a break from tweeting to do elk season.” It was nonstop action and kind of entertaining. But lately, it’s been crickets. Truth Social has been about as quiet as John Krasinski in A Quiet Place (great movie, if you like stress). The price stabilized. The wild headlines stopped. Even the retail crowd seemed to lose interest. It was like the MAGA meme-stock fair packed up all the cheap rides and left town.

But now, after Trump launched a strike on Iran, his ticker is making noise again. And this time, it’s not about tweets or Truths or random livestreams… it’s about fundamentals (or you could say a fundamentally weird decision). Trump Media just approved a $400 million stock buyback. From a company that’s never turned a profit. In fact, they reported a $400.9 million loss last year… on $3.6 million in revenue. (Go ahead and do the math… that’s about $111 lost for every $1 earned.) And yet, they say they’ve got the cash to spend.

And here’s where things get weird (well, weirder): this is a company that brought in $3.6 million in revenue last year… and lost $400.9 million. That’s right… they lost $111 for every $1 they earned. Not exactly a glowing example of financial discipline. So why are they buying back stock? In normal circumstances, share buybacks are something mature, profitable companies do to return value to shareholders. You generate free cash flow, your stock looks undervalued, and you reduce your share count to make everyone’s piece of the pie a little bigger. Great… textbook corporate finance. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Trump Media is... not that.

They’ve never turned a profit. Their entire business… Truth Social, a streaming platform called Truth+, and an upcoming fintech arm called Truth.Fi… is still very much in the “we promise we’ll be big later” phase. But thanks to a massive private raise last month ($2.3 billion from 50 institutional investors), the company now sits on a pile of about $3 billion in cash. That raise includes $1.5 billion in equity and another $1 billion in convertible notes.

So, yes… they technically can afford the buyback. But it raises a very real question: is this about building long-term value… or just propping up the stock? Keep in mind: Trump is the biggest shareholder, with over 114 million shares via a revocable trust. Buying back $400 million worth of stock (especially with DJT down nearly 50% on the year) could help pump the price, which would immediately inflate the value of his personal stake.

Also worth noting: the company made a big deal about the buyback being funded separately from their other wild strategy… buying as much Bitcoin for whatever price possible (genius strategy). Trump Media still plans to allocate up to $2.3 billion into Bitcoin, becoming one of the largest corporate holders alongside the likes of MicroStrategy.

CEO Devin Nunes framed the Bitcoin pivot as a defense against what he called “financial discrimination against conservative businesses.” But it’s also an obvious hope and a prayer to tie DJT’s long-term hopes to crypto moon cycles (hey if Saylor can do it, why not us?).

So what’s really going on here? Well I’m no rocket scientist, but this isn’t a value play. It’s a narrative play. It’s about maintaining excitement, appeasing shareholders, and signaling strength… even when the fundamentals look worse than a public toilet. The stock did jump 3% on the buyback news, but it’s still trading near the bottom of its 52-week range.

And they’re still not making money. They’re just using other people’s capital to fuel two very speculative bets: that Truth Social becomes a real business… and that Bitcoin bails them out. Is it getting attention? Absolutely, I mean it’s Trump. Is it sustainable? We'll see. But you have to give him the nod: DJT is back in the headlines… and that alone might be the whole point.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.