Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the social networking site Truth Social, plummeted on Thursday following former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in a hush money trial.
A New York jury found Trump guilty of paying hush money to a porn actor who claimed the two had sex and falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.
Following news of the verdict, Trump Media shares fell about 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday.
The stock, trading under the ticker symbol “DJT,” has been unusually volatile since its debut in late March, joining a group of meme stocks prone to bouncing from highs to lows as small investors try to capture upward momentum at the right time.
The company’s shares have tripled this year, frequently rising or falling by double-digit percentages in a single day in the process.
On March 26th, it reached a peak of $80 in intraday trading.
For comparison, the S&P 500 is up about 10% year to date.
Earlier this month, Trump Media announced in its first earnings report as a publicly traded company that it lost more than $300 million in the last quarter.
The company posted a loss of $327.6 million for the three months ended March 31, including a $311 million non-cash charge related to its merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., it said.
DWAC is an example of a type of company known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, which can offer startups a quicker and easier route to going public with much less oversight.
Trump Media & Technology this month fired an auditor who federal regulators recently accused of “massive fraud.”
The media company fired BF Borgers as its independent public accounting firm on May 3 and delayed the filing of its quarterly financial reports.
Trump Media has replaced at least two auditors so far, one of whom resigned in July 2023 and another who was fired by the board in March just as it rehired B.F. Borgers.
Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying his company’s business records in connection with an alleged scheme to conceal embarrassing information about him during his 2016 Republican presidential campaign.
This charge is a felony; Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen In 2006, Trump paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money to silence her allegations that she had had an extramarital affair with Trump.
Trump was accused of falsely reporting payments to Cohen as legal expenses to conceal their connection to the hush money payments.
Trump’s defense argued that the payments to Cohen were for legitimate legal services.
