Seth Meyers didn’t choose a career in comedy for his love of math, but the Late Night host knows enough about addition, subtraction, and failing social media businesses to understand that something seems off about the recent multi-billion-dollar valuation of Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
“I don’t need to tell you Donald Trump needs cash and he needs it ASAP,” Meyers said at the top of Thursday’s “A Closer Look” segment. “The guy’s been hawking bibles on TV like he’s trying to raise money to go to Jesus Camp.”
While there’s nothing like a $60 version of the good book to help put a few extra dollars in your pocket—especially one that inexplicably comes with copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights—it turns out Trump didn’t really even need to take to bible-shilling. That’s because the cash-strapped former president’s golden goose was staring him in the face this whole time: Truth Social.
Despite most reports over the past two years since its launch stating that Trump’s social media site has been what Meyers calls an “abject failure,” the presidential hopeful’s stake in the company was stated to be worth an estimated $4.6 billion on Tuesday of this week—essentially doubling his net worth.
“You might be asking yourself: Donald Trump has a media and technology company?,” Meyers explained. “And the answer is: No, he doesn’t. What he has is a dumb Twitter ripoff for MAGA trolls.’
Truth reportedly has fewer than 500,000 active monthly users, and even that number is dwindling. According to CNN, the company generated a total of $3.4 million in the first nine months of 2023, but lost $49 million during that same time period. You don’t have to be good at math to know that that’s a pretty big discrepancy.
“The only way this business could be more of a failure if is every time you opened an account you got a free Zune, a bottle of Crystal Pepsi, a Blockbuster card, a Motorola flip phone that came pre-loaded with a MySpace account, and a round-trip [ticket] next to the door on Alaska Airlines,” joked Meyers.
“Trump’s stock market windfall has nothing to do with the reality of his business and that’s obvious to everyone,” Meyers explained. “It’s just a buying spree fueled by Trump supporters and traders capitalizing on the enthusiasm of Trump supporters.”
Meyers then shared a clip from Fox News in which host Jesse Watters swore he is a regular Truth Social user—but wouldn’t hand over his phone to prove it.
That MAGA enthusiasm was enough to earn Truth Social a valuation of close to $7 billion when it went public earlier this week, though Meyers was quick to explain that that didn’t mean the numbers would stay that high. “The stock’s value is based entirely on one thing,” said Meyers, “which is Trump’s brand. And in its own SEC filings, the company admitted Trump could tank the value” should Trump be found guilty in any one of his many ongoing legal dealings.
Meyers then went on to quote a financial expert who told CNN that Truth Social’s current stock price is “clearly a bubble”—one that will eventually and very likely burst and end with Truth Social’s stock prices hovering around the $2 or less mark.
“The paper value of Trump’s stock is wildly divorced from the reality of the underlying business, which is an abject failure,” said Meyers, who predicts that “eventually, the bubble will burst.”
