No. of Recommendations: 23
Trump's DJT stock continues to tank now that the lock-out for insiders expired September 19. Trump doesn't seem to be selling yet but clearly other insiders have been unloading their shares and the stock is now down to about $12.51, way down from its peak earlier in the year at roughly $79.
To properly guage the acumen of anyone stupid enough to buy this as a (cough) legitimate stock offering or even as part of a highly speculative strategy for profiting off Trump's propensity to grift others, you need to look no further than a few numbers in their 2Q2024 report and some estimated statistics online for their (ahem) "customer base."
Their 2Q2024 filing states the company lost a net $8.4 million dollars, roughly half of which was related to one-time costs for the IPO, and had total gross revenue of $837,000. The company won't release normal social media statistics on total monthly "visits" and unique monthly "visits" but others have estimated Truth Social attracts about 5 million clicks per month across 1 million unique visitors.
Here's where the fun with math comes in.
I suspect many of those holding DJT still under the illusion that DJT and Truth Social are a legitimate social media company expect that the company must have some big hosting presence somewhere in a data center, hence the $9.237 million in expenses. Not really.
First, the $8.4 million loss was after factoring in $837,000 in revenue so total expenses were roughly $9.237 million and the company claimed half of the $8.4 million loss was due to one-time IPO expenses. That means actual "operating" expenses for the quarter were $5.037 million. So worst case, how much of that operating expense was due to compute needs to run Truth Social?
Well...
Let's assume the 5 million total clicks per month isn't evenly spread across all 24 hours and all 30 days in a typical month. Let's concentrate it across weekdays only (23 days per month) and fewer hours each day (16) to take into account peak demand which would boost compute needs.
clicks/second = 5,000,000 / 23 days / 16 hours / 60 mins / 60 seconds = 3.77 clicks / second
To put that processing load into perspective, the processing power of a single laptop computer can probably handle 20-30 web service requests per second without even spinning up the fan. Can any media company whose traffic could fit on a laptop deserve a billion dollar market capitalization? Or even a million dollar capitalization? Not in any rational world.
Whatever DJT may be spending the $5.037 million in quarterly operations on, it certainly isn't data center hosting services to handle the load of Truth Social.
WTH