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Julia Demaree Nikhinso\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Something strange<\/span> occurred recently: The stock price of Donald Trump\u2019s beleaguered media company shot up.<\/p>\n What happened? While the cause isn\u2019t entirely clear, the price spike does seem to correspond to the president\u2019s announcement that he was banning three mainstream media outlets\u2014CNN, MSNOW, and Politico\u2014<\/em>from the White House. It\u2019s difficult to pinpoint exactly why a stock moves, and Trump Media and Technology Group\u2019s price has been volatile since the company went public in March 2024. But Trump has long touted Truth Social\u2014which is TMTG\u2019s core product\u2014as his major tool to reach the American people directly, without any filtering from legacy media giants. Not surprisingly, Trump first announced<\/a> his ban of MSNOW, CNN, and Politico<\/em> on Truth Social.<\/p>\n At the time of that announcement Friday afternoon, the TMTG\u2019s stock price was hovering around $8.84, and that\u2019s about where it was when markets closed for the weekend an hour later. Early Monday morning, before the market opened, Trump continued his Truth Social-based assault on White House reporters, insisting<\/a> that he wasn\u2019t attacking the free press and was instead going after the \u201cFAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer\u2026and must be stopped, NOW!\u201d<\/p>\n When the market bell rang shortly after, TMTG rose 21 cents, or about 2.3 percent. Around 10 a.m., the remaining television networks in the White House press pool announced that they would be refusing to provide live coverage of Trump\u2019s events until he unbanned their colleagues. TMTG began rising again. By Tuesday evening, it reached a peak of $9.40, the highest it had been in weeks.<\/p>\n Trump is the largest TMTG shareholder, with an estimated 114 million shares. So the price jump early this week briefly represented a theoretical $64 million boost to the value of the president\u2019s holding. While the stock price has started to settle back down again\u2014it\u2019s still slightly over $9\u2014it seems likely the jolt was related to Trump\u2019s attacks on independent outlets. After all, there has been no other obvious news in the past week that might explain the stock\u2019s fluctuation. There rarely is, in fact, much good news for the company, which might explain why its stock has slid from a high of $79.38 back in March 2024 to its current price, a drop of more than 88 percent.<\/p>\n Much of the latest news for the company has been grim. Last month, for instance, an independent web traffic monitoring company estimated<\/a> that Truth Social has experienced massive declines in traffic since 2025, arguably matching the declining popularity of the platform\u2019s most notable user, Trump himself. That decline in traffic was partnered with news that in the second quarter of 2026, the company lost<\/a> an estimated $238 million. That loss was largely due to the company\u2019s heavy investment in bitcoin, an attempted pivot after it became clear that Truth Social\u2019s ad revenue was unlikely to ever be much of an earner<\/a>.<\/p>\n One potential bright spot for the company was the announcement<\/a> that it would be selling API access\u2014essentially nearly immediate access to its users\u2019 Truth Social posts\u2014for $100,000 a month. It\u2019s a service primarily targeting high-speed traders, likely to help them make fast trades when Trump announces market-moving news from his account.<\/p>\n But even that isn\u2019t a sure hit. The company says at least 10 customers have signed up\u2014welcome revenue, but still a fraction of the billions earned by social media rivals like Meta and Elon Musk\u2019s X. And on Monday, the city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit<\/a> asking California state courts to block the API scheme, claiming it violates a number of statutes designed to prevent insider trading. That lawsuit joins another suit<\/a>, filed in federal court last month, which claims the service violates the First and Fifth Amendments and amounts to selling access.<\/p>\n In response to the boycott by major television outlets, the White House announced on Monday that it was launching its own streaming service to provide access to Trump\u2019s public appearances: TrumpTV. But notably, the service won\u2019t be hosted on TMTG\u2019s own video streaming service, Truth+, but will instead appear<\/a> on YouTube.<\/p>\n