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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

> "the world's most overvalued stock"

There's always Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, ticker DJT.

$6.5 billion market cap. Annual revenue $4 million (that's an "m").

It's a social media company that doesn't reveal any usage numbers or other KPIs. The company's auditor was just revealed by the SEC to be a complete scam with 100% fraudulent audits.

So why would anyone buy this? Well, it's 65% owned by a presidential candidate in the current election. The same candidate is threatened by massive legal fees.

So if you're Saudi Arabia, you can easily afford to spend a billion dollars on technically worthless DJT stock, and it goes straight to the pockets of the politician who has a very good chance of winning the 2024 presidential election. And there's nothing illegal about this, apparently. (For prior art, see that time when Qatar paid $1B for a distressed New York property owned by this same president's son-in-law.)

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$2.5M revenue, $52M loss. What even is that?

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/trump-media-technology-group/...

A way for foreign nationals to donate billions to a US presidential campaign legally.

There are perhaps other ways, too.

Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation? http://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime-...

Clinton's foundation got millions from Saudis, Gates: https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/18/clinton.donations/

I have little doubt there are many ways. These are a bit harder to directly pull a billion dollars out of, though.

Why is the valuation so high then? Surely all the HFTs have enough money to short it and earn money off of it. I think a company with $0 valuation would be easier to transfer money. As only he could sell his share for >$0 for donation.

To short, you need to pay to borrow shares. And that’s not easy on a stock like DJT. It has a small float, and since professionals consider it overvalued, the premiums are unusually high. It also has an army of retail fans who can produce surprise spikes, meme stock style.

Hedge funds make their money with trades that are not obvious to everyone, because if they were, they’d be too crowded. “Short DJT” is definitely in that category.

> Surely all the HFTs have enough money to short it and earn money off of it.

They asked their shareholders to disable short loans (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/trump-med...).

Before that, everyone was already shorting to the point of 500% fees. https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240406227/why...

"Based on that data, to short 100 shares of Trump Media & Technology Group at the current price, it would cost between $24,895 and $29,874 a year. That means the stock would have to fall about 1.4% a day just to cover the cost of shorting it. And if the short were held for a year, the bet would still lose about $20,000 to $25,000, even if the stock price fell to $1."

The thing stinks to be sure but you need more evidence to make that claim.

Presidential candidates are allowed to use unlimited personal funds in their campaign.

Trump owns billions of $DJT stock. His lockup period ends well before the election.

The share price can be manipulated at will given enough money, the Saudis have plenty of that, and there’s already a good track record of them using it this way; a $2B investment in Trump’s son-in-law “despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal”, as an example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-in...

Donald Trump's hotels and other businesses accepted more than $7.8m (£6.1m) from foreign governments during his presidency. This is not news.

The best democracy money can buy. ;)

Personally I think that award belongs to the United Kingdom. They don’t even need a constitution.

To ensure the moneyed classes of Britain are well looked after, they have both a king who is a billionaire and a prime minister whose net worth is a more modest $500 million.

The King is irrelevant and the PM got his money by marrying an heiress. No, it's true that money is a problem, but those are the wrong places to look. Try https://www.transparency.org.uk/can-you-buy-lordship or https://news.sky.com/story/michelle-mone-who-is-she-and-what...

It's okay though, they asked congress to investigate the 'market manipulation' suggesting that short sellers were tanking the stock.. All while the majority shareholder makes false and misleading public claims about its fiscal stability to retail investors.

And actively pushing users to retain control over brokers of their shares.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-medias-fight-turns-t...

And they tout the free market. Bulls and Bears for thee, but not for me.

Wait, DJT un-crashed?

The Trump stock is almost the platonic ideal of a meme stock; just a stock ticker for people to gamble on, without the inconvenience of an actual company attached to it.

Traditional meme stocks (GameStop, Bed Bath and Beyond, AMC, arguably Tesla) have a large, poorly-run company attached, which is really extraneous to the stock's core purpose, that of ensnaring day-traders.

I mean, it's _possible_ the Trump one is driven by the bribery angle, but common things being common it may just be a very compelling meme stock, sharing as it does the name of a meme president.

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