Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social will begin trading under the ticker “DJT” on Tuesday, putting the real estate tycoon — and his initials — at the helm of a publicly traded company once again.
Trump Media & Technology Group, whose main asset is the social media service Truth Social, said in a statement Monday that the ticker symbol will be active tomorrow, following its merger with a so-called blank-check company, also known as a special purchase acquisition company (SPAC). SPACs are shell companies created to take a private business public without going through an initial public offering.
In the case of Trump’s media business, the shareholders of the SPAC, called Digital World Acquisition Corp., voted Friday in favor of the merger, ushering in the next step of taking the new Truth Social company public without an IPO. The merged company officially changed its name to Trump Media & Technology Group after the deal was completed on Monday, the statement said.
The eponymous symbol “is so on brand” for Trump, noted Kristi Marvin, chief executive of SPACInsider.com, a service that provides news and data about the SPAC industry.
Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp. jumped $8.56, or 23%, to $45.50 in early afternoon trading on Monday.
The company could begin trading under the DJT ticker with a valuation of $5 billion or more, based on the Digital World Acquisition Corp. stock price. That’s a heady market capitalization for Truth Social’s parent company, which booked $3.3 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2023, a regulatory filing earlier this year showed.
To be sure, plenty of tech companies have gone public while in the red, yet typically investors want to see that a business can grow its user base and ramp up sales quickly by appealing to a broad range of advertisers. Truth Social, which doesn’t release its user numbers, had roughly 5 million active members in February, according to research firm Similarweb estimates.
By comparison, Reddit, which went public last week, had about 73.1 million daily active users last year, while revenue jumped 21% to $804 million in 2023, it reported last month ahead of the IPO filing.
Previous DJT ticker: From IPO to penny stock
It’s also not the first time that Trump has overseen a publicly traded company with the ticker DJT.
The previous iteration of the DJT ticker occurred in 1995, when Trump took his Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts public in an IPO. The idea was to raise money in the public markets that would help Trump expand his casino businesses, according to the New York Times’ account of the IPO.
The shares initially performed well, increasing from its IPO price of $14 to a high of $35 a share soon after. But the stock plunged over the next few years, eventually trading for pennies, according to the Washington Post.
Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2004.
