Barry Diller, a billionaire investor, said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, is a “fraud.”
He stated, “It's a fraud, similar to everything he has been involved in, being some form of a swindle, ” Diller shared during the CNBC interview. He was referring to former President Donald Trump and Trump Media & Technology Group on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Diller also criticized the individuals who invested in the company after its impressive stock market debut, referring to them as “foolish.” It reported strong stock market debut
.
“I mean, who would buy a company that literally. … I mean, I think, what does it have, $30 of revenue?” Diller questioned. “Why would you put … how could you put a value on it?” “They’re buying it for other reasons, just like they bought theaters when there was no theater business or they bought GameStop, or whatever. That’s stupid — it’s stupid stuff,” Diller continued, referring to when Reddit users bought and held onto
large amounts of shares in companies like GameStop and AMC during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following its first week of trading, Trump Media & Technology Group closed at $62 per share, despite losing $58 million
last year, according to regulatory filings.
In a social media post on Thursday, Trump claimed that his platform was “very solid,” despite the company’s reported losses in 2023. He stated, “All of the competitors to TRUTH SOCIAL, especially those in the Radical Left Democrats Party who are failing at every level, like to use their vaunted ‘disinformation machine’ to try and convince people, and it is not easy to do, that TRUTH is not such a big deal and doesn’t ‘get the word out’ as well as various others, which they know to be false,” in a Truth Social post.
Trump also mentioned that Truth Social had more than $200 million in cash and “ZERO DEBT.”
In a statement to The Hill via email, Trump Media & Technology Group stated, “It is unsurprising to see die-hard Trump haters and leftwing flacks blow a gasket now that Truth Social has become a public company that, still today, refuses to suppress political expression that contradicts the narratives they want to enforce.”
The Hill has reached out to a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign for comment.
Updated: 5:16 p.m.
