Donald Trump returned to X on Monday for a highly anticipated sit-down with Elon Musk, but it didn’t translate into a rise in the value of the former president’s own social media company.
Shares of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, were down 3% to trade at $24.07 on Tuesday morning, still above the lowest price of $22.50 since its listing in late March.
The drop followed a 5% plunge ahead of Trump’s return to the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he used during his successful 2016 run for the Republican nomination and presidential election.
Trump Media’s shares reached a high of $66 shortly after its IPO but have plummeted in recent weeks.
Last week, TMTG released its second-quarter results, revealing that the company suffered a net loss of $16.4 million on revenue of $837,000.
Truth Social was launched after President Trump’s X-account @realDonaldTrump was blocked following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
According to web analytics site Similar Web, Truth Social’s user base grew to 16 million visitors last month, a 92% increase from the previous month.
Musk-owned X has more than 200 million daily users, according to data.
Trump was due to return to the X for a relaxed two-hour chat with the tycoon, but technical issues delayed the start of the event by more than 40 minutes at 8 p.m.
Musk, a Trump supporter, blamed the problems on “distributed denial of service” attacks, in which servers or networks are flooded with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to take them down, but the claim could not be verified.
The interview follows a series of posts by Trump on X and marks his second time using the account since it was reinstated last year.
TMTG’s filing with the SEC said Trump “is generally required to post all social media content on Truth Social and may not post the same content on any other social media site within six hours.”
Musk, a Trump supporter, has set up an outside super PAC spending group to support Trump’s campaign.
