After a buzzy opening week on the stock market, Trump Media & Technology Group took a tumble as publicly filed documents showed the company posted a $58 million loss in 2023.
And those filings reveal just how well compensated Trump loyalists were as the company floundered fiscally.
The biggest winner so far is Devin Nunes, a long-time Trump loyalist who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee investigated surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign and called out what he claimed was Big Tech censorship of Trump.
But Trump’s poster-in-chief, Dan Scavino, isn’t far behind.
According to the filing today, Nunes made a $750,000 salary in 2023, and per a compensation agreement Nunes signed in 2022, that salary gets bumped up to $1,000,000 this year.
That’s on top of 145,000 shares of Trump Media stock Nunes holds, which were worth around $7 million dollars after the company went public last week.
But news of the company’s substantial losses over the past couple of years—which totaled over $108 million—sent the stock tumbling, with a 20% drop by midday Monday.
A filing discussing the company’s financial state acknowledged that the company simply isn’t profitable, or even close to profitable.
“TMTG has historically incurred operating losses and negative cash flows from operating activities,” the filing reads. “TMTG expects to continue to incur operating losses and negative cash flows from operating activities for the foreseeable future, as it works to expand its user base, attracting more platform partners and advertisers.”
That growth is expected to come from the “overall appeal of the Truth Social Platform,” the filing reads.
It also discusses potential plans for “state-of-the-art technology” for video streaming that would make the company a “home” for “canceled content creators.”
As for current revenue streams, which totaled just $4.1 million in 2023, the company has advertisement publishing agreements with the streaming and video hosting site Rumble, and a murky company called The Affinity Media Exchange, Inc.
But the company’s money woes and tumbling stock price shouldn’t be any worry for highly paid consultants to Trump Media. One of those consultants, Dan Scavino, a key Trump loyalist who helped Trump with his ubiquitous Twitter posts during the 2016 campaign and his presidency, has been raking in nearly a quarter million dollars a year for Trump Media since 2021.
Scavino, who met Trump at 16 when he was the former president’s caddy, and once managed golf courses for the president, was reportedly one of Trump’s closest confidants in the White House.
“He is essentially the comms department of the White House,” Trump’s former campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon told Politico in a 2019 profile.
On top of Scavino’s $240,000 annual consulting fee, paid to his company Hudson Digital, LLC, Scavino is getting a $600,000 lump sum “retention bonus” because of the company going public. The company also issued a Promissory note to Scavino promising $2.2 million in additional payments.
Scavino did not immediately reply to questions about compensation.
Kashyap Patel, who was a key aide to Nunes in the House, also got consulting fees worth $120,000 last year. Patel is now a member of the company’s Board of Directors.
And while the company’s stock continues its up-and-down tumble, largely fueled by investors in Trump himself, if not the underlying value of the company, executive stockholders won’t be able to cash out just yet.
According to a lock-up agreement signed on March 25 this year, holders agreed not to sell their stocks any earlier than six months after the company went public as long as it stays over $12 a share.
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Source: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dan-scavino-trump-media/
