A Company Making $2 Million Lost $238 Million on Crypto, and the CEO Called It ‘Disciplined’

Let me get this straight. I clip coupons, I meal-plan around what’s on sale at Kroger, I drove the same minivan for eleven years because the payment was done. And a company run by the President of the United States just lost $238 million in three months. On crypto. While pulling in less than $2 million in actual revenue.

I’m going to need a minute.

Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, reported its second-quarter numbers on Monday. Revenue: $1.7 million. Loss: $238 million. That is not a typo. They lost more than ten times what they lost in the same quarter last year. The per-share loss went from 8 cents to 86 cents. I checked the math myself because at this point I don’t trust anybody’s arithmetic but my own.

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Here’s where the money went. More than $190 million of that loss came from what the company called declines in “digital assets, digital assets pledged, and equity securities.” That is Wall Street speak for “we gambled on bitcoin and a token called Cronos and the price went down.” An analyst named Markus Thielen from 10x Research told the BBC that Trump Media is basically “a crypto holdings firm wrapped around a media company.” So the social media platform your uncle posts on isn’t a social media platform. It’s a crypto wallet with a comment section bolted on.

The new CEO, a man named Kevin McGurn, got on a conference call and called this “the disciplined choice to pivot.” Disciplined. He lost two hundred and thirty-eight million dollars and used the word disciplined. I have questions for the manager. If I ran my household like this, my husband would have me committed. If I ran a lemonade stand like this, the bank would have me arrested. But when a company with the president’s name on the door does it, the stock only drops 8 percent. Because the rules are different for these people. They always have been.

McGurn says he’s now abandoning the crypto and online betting experiments to “refocus on the social media mission.” Oh, so you’re refocusing. Great. You spent a year branching into industries that have nothing to do with media, torched a quarter of a billion dollars, and now you’re refocusing. That’s not discipline. That’s a toddler who set the kitchen on fire and then proudly announced he would now play in the living room instead.

And here’s the part that made me put my phone down and stare at the wall. The company’s big new plan is something called Truth API, which gives Wall Street trading firms early access to the top posters on the platform. The top poster is Donald Trump. The president of the United States. Who, as the reporting notes, “often moves markets by breaking major U.S. policy shifts on the site.” So they’re selling a head start on the president’s social media posts to hedge funds. Good government watchdogs are calling it what it is: a vehicle to profit off the presidency. Democrats are vowing to investigate. I’ll believe that when I see it.

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Truth Social’s traffic fell sharply this summer, by the way. The New York Times reported that. It already had a fraction of the users that X has, and even those people are leaving. So the platform is shrinking, the crypto bets are bleeding, and the new business model is selling VIP access to the president’s feed to Wall Street.

I do my own research. I read the filings. I look at the numbers. And what I see is a company that makes almost nothing, loses almost everything, and keeps getting away with it because the guy in charge has his name on the building and the seal on his office.

You try losing $238 million and calling it discipline. See how that goes over at your house.