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Its price Trump media Shares fell below $30 early Friday morning, more than $40 below where its shares first traded when the social networking company went public on March 26.
Shares of DJT fell more than 8% in the first hour of trading on Friday.
The latest price drop for the ticker continued a slide that included a 5.4% drop on Thursday and a drop of more than 8.5% on Wednesday.
Shares of Trump Media, which owns the Truth Social app, have fallen more than 47% in the month to date, wiping billions of dollars off the company’s market cap.
Former President Donald Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, owning nearly 60% of its shares. Trump is set to begin jury selection Monday in his criminal trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump Media on March 26 opened the first day of trading at $70.90 per share, reaching a high of nearly $80 later in the day. During trading that day, the company’s market capitalization exceeded $9.5 billion.
By 1:07 p.m. ET on Friday, Trump Media’s market capitalization was $4.28 billion, after shares offset some of the early price decline. The stock was selling for $31.26 per share, down 3.56% at that point.
Trump Media began public trading a day after merging with the shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp., which was created to help a private company go public.
Trump Media last year had revenue of just $4.1 million and reported a net loss of $58 million.
That performance and the company’s relatively high share price have attracted strong interest from short sellers, who make trades that are essentially bets that a company’s share price will fall.
As of this week, so-called short interest in DJT was $208.7 million, with 5.44 million shares shorted, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, a leading financial data marketplace.
There were less than 100,000 shares of Trump Media available to borrow for sale. Traders who want to sell shares must borrow shares to sell them, with the expectation that they will later buy back the same number of shares at a lower price to return to the lender, earning the difference in price between trades.
Trump Media has 136.7 million shares outstanding.
A week ago, traders who wanted to short Trump Media stock had to pay as much as 900% in annual funding costs, meaning they would then need to drop $30 per share within a month to break even on their trades, said Dusaniwsky.
Since then, however, funding costs for short-term trading at Trump Media have plummeted to 200%.
Trump Media began when social media giant X, then known as Twitter, banned Trump from the app after a crowd of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, frequently posts on Truth Social. He used the app to settle the four pending criminal cases he faces, along with civil lawsuits that have resulted in judgments against him exceeding $500 million.
Trump this week threw a party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, to celebrate the Trump Media.
“I think the truth has become so important. It’s powerful, it’s committed,” Trump told attendees, according to a report on RSBN news website.
“Remember we have no debt and we have over $200 million in cash, which is very liquid,” Trump said of the company, whose CEO is former Republican congressman Devin Nunes.
— Additional reporting from CNBC Nick Wells.
This is developing news. Check back for updates.