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
No. of Recommendations: 6
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.
I'm sure they wouldn't contract out the data center services to a private company, who then subcontracts with someone like AWS (a grand a month to AWS should provide plenty of horespower). And there's no way that private company charges a really big markup (say along the lines of 100 times the subcontract cost) on those services back to DJT. That would just be funneling money out of DJT to that private company.
No. That's not going to happen.
--Peter
