Trump is booted off Bloomberg's Billionaire list after Truth Social stock price dives

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Donald Trump has been booted from Bloomberg’s daily list of the 500 top billionaires after the stock price of his Truth Social platform plummeted.

On Tuesday, the former president was nowhere to be seen on the list of the world’s richest people, going from Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company, at $223bn, to John Sall, a businessman and computer software developer, in spot 500.

Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, began trading at $78 and finished its first day at $57.99, allowing Mr Trump to join the list of the world’s 500 richest people. But by Wednesday morning, the stock was trading at just above $36 – a likely cause of Mr Trump’s removal from the list of the top billionaires.

Shares in the company went down by 12 per cent on Friday and eight per cent on Monday, USA Today noted.

Compared to its peak late last month, the stock, going under the ticker “DJT”, has now dropped more than 50 per cent. On Tuesday, the stock went below $35.50 for the first time after the merger between Trump Media and the public shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. It began trading under DJT on 26 March.

After hitting the market, the stock was valued at $8bn, but it has since lost billions in value.

Mr Trump owns 78.75 million shares, or about 60 per cent, of Trump Media. His stake was worth around $6bn shortly after the firm went public, prompting his appearance on the billionaires’ index. On Tuesday, his stake was worth around $3bn. Mr Trump needs the approval of the board of Trump Media if he wants to get rid of any of his shares before September.

On Tuesday afternoon, Forbes had Mr Trump as the 653rd richest person in the world with a net worth of $4.8bn.

Wall Street initially valued Trump Media at about $14bn, but experts have said that number is deeply flawed.

“This is a very unusual situation,” Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida, told CNN last month. “The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals.”

Mr Ritter added that the closest comparison would be so-called meme stocks such as GameStop and AMC, which rose during the pandemic amid a push from retail traders. He said Trump Media is likely worth about $2 a share.

“The underlying business doesn’t seem to be worth much. There is no evidence this is going to become a large, highly profitable company,” Mr Ritter told CNN at the time.

“I’m reasonably confident the stock price will eventually drop to $2 a share and could even go below that if the company blows through the money it got from the merger,” he added.

However, executives at the company still stand to have a good payday, SEC filings revealed.