President Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, filed to re-register for sale billions of dollars’ worth of shares that he has in the company and that are held in a trust overseen by his eldest son.
The registration statement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, permits the trust to sell shares, but that doesn’t mean any sale is imminent. The nearly 115 million shares held in the trust were previously registered last summer by Trump Media, which is the parent company of Truth Social, the social media platform that Mr. Trump has used as his primary online megaphone.
A few weeks after winning the presidential election, Mr. Trump transferred his shares in Trump Media to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is controlled by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The president has said on several occasions that he had no plans to sell shares.
President Trump is the largest single shareholder in Trump Media, controlling roughly 53 percent of its shares. The stock, which surged after the election, has plunged more than 40 percent this year.
With the stock trading around $19, Mr. Trump’s stake is worth nearly $2.2 billion. Trump Media’s share price has swung wildly since it went public a year ago. Its trading patterns often seem divorced from the financials of the company, which has so far generated scant revenues and continues to post quarterly losses.
In a news release, Trump Media said the registration statement was being misconstrued by the “legacy media” as a new event, even though it had previously registered the shares. The company said it was “a routine filing that re-registers” the shares for future sale.
The filing also registered for sale shares held by others. Among the other shareholders is Yorkville Advisors, an investment firm in New Jersey that is working with Trump Media to create retail investment products, including a crypto exchange-traded fund. The filing registered a little over 17 million shares Yorkville had acquired from Trump Media as part of a long-term financing arrangement.
Also included in the registration statement are 106,000 shares held by the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi. Ms. Bondi had acquired the shares in exchange for consulting work she did for a shareholder of the cash-rich special purpose acquisition company that Trump Media merged with to go public.
In her ethics agreement filed with the federal Office of Government Ethics, Ms. Bondi said she planned to divest herself of her equity stake in Trump Media within 90 days of her confirmation, which would be in early May.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com