Billionaire says Trump Media a ‘scam,’ calls investors ‘dopes’

Truth Social parent company Trump Media is a “scam,” billionaire investor Barry Diller told CNBC in an interview Thursday.

“It’s a scam, just like everything he’s ever been involved in is some sort of con,” Diller said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” referring to former President Donald Trump and Trump Media & Technology Group.

Diller also said the people investing in the company following its strong stock market debut are “dopes.”

“I mean, who would buy a company that literally. … I mean, I think, what does it have, $30 of revenue?” Diller said. “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 scores 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.

Trump claimed his platform was “very solid” Thursday in a social media post, despite the company’s reported losses in 2023.

“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,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

The former president also said that Truth Social had more than $200 million in cash and “ZERO DEBT.”

In an emailed statement to The Hill, Trump Media & Technology Group said that “[i]t 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.