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For Donald Trump, TruthSocial, his unsuccessful and money-losing Twitter competitor, has mainly been a place to retreat to when banned from the former, and a megaphone to trumpet his many opinions on his enemies, golf, and the music of Paul Anka. But the company that owns TruthSocial, Trump Media & Technology Group, has also been a way for the president to draw his political allies closer, through payments, board seats, and generous stock rewards. While the publicly-traded TMTG is unlikely to ever become a real success outside the Trump universe, it provides a window into his transactional second presidency and its unprecedented mingling of his corporate and political fiefdoms.
“The road to influence in the United States runs through Trump Media.”
Three people who have held shares or served on the board of TMTG have been appointed to high-profile positions in the Trump administration: Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. The president has named at least four others with TMTG ties to federal roles. While some of these officials promised in federal ethics filings to divest from Trump’s company after taking office, they have yet to file paperwork showing they’ve done so.
Since Trump’s reelection, TruthSocial is private business being used in a quasi-official capacity. Trump takes to TruthSocial to announce appointments, publicize his executive orders, and complain about judges—all of which makes it more or less necessary for journalists, politicians, and watchdogs to check the site. TMTG’s stock (which trades as DJT, the president’s initials) has been as volatile as Trump’s presidency. It clocked a small increase last week after Trump announced the company would launch a series of cryptocurrency products.
As my colleague Russ Choma recently noted, the company struggles to remain profitable as it spends money “in odd and unhelpful ways.” For instance, TMTG paid Donald Trump Jr. $813,000, a quarter of TMTG’s 2024 annual revenue, “just for showing up at board meetings,” Choma wrote. CEO Devin Nunes, a former California Republican congressman, has made at least $6.3 million running the company since 2022—“a stunning figure for a firm that is struggling to earn any money,” Choma noted.
Now, a new analysis by Accountable Tech, a nonprofit corporate and government watchdog group, has found that few of the administration officials with ties to TMTG have filed documentation proving they’ve divested from the company. While McMahon and Bondi still have more time to complete their promises to divest within 90 days of their appointments, Patel previously suggested to senators weighing his nomination that he has nothing to divest. (The Department of Education, Bondi’s office, and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment.) As for Trump himself, the president said before the election that he wouldn’t divest from his businesses if he took office again. In December, he transferred his shares of TMTG, then worth around $4 billion, into a revocable trust of which he is the sole beneficiary.
According to TMTG’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, several Trump-appointed officials have owned large amounts of shares in the company, which are valuable despite the company’s often uninspiring stock market performance. June 2024 SEC filings show Bondi holding 106,250 shares, worth about $2 million today. On archived versions of the company’s website, both Patel and McMahon were listed as “directors” of TMTG’s board until sometime in mid-March, weeks after both were sworn in to run federal agencies. McMahon was replaced on the board by former GOP congressman George Holding; Patel’s spot was filled by former Trump Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt.
While Patel told senators in written testimony that he’d never been paid as a TMTG director, according to SEC documents, Patel earned $120,000 annually as a consultant beginning in 2022. When asked during his Senate confirmation how many shares he owned in TMTG and if he would divest them, he wrote only, “I have never accepted compensation for serving as a board member for Trump Media and Technology Group, and as such, I do not have any ownership or stake in this company.” The same day, a SEC filing revealed that Patel was gifted about $826,000 worth of TMTG stock at a board meeting in January, with a quarter immediately available and the remainder to vest over the following two years, though he told a Senate committee that he would not accept the shares.
“Even though this represented compensation for past services I had provided,” Patel wrote, “out of an abundance of caution and to avoid any appearance of any conflict, I did not and will not accept that compensation.” On March 21, Patel divested himself of a number of other stocks, according to an Office of Government Ethics filing obtained by Mother Jones, including shares in Rumble, Palantir, Apple, Caterpillar, Cigna, and Eli Lilly, and Bitcoin from the cryptocurrency management company Grayscale. He didn’t list having any TMTG stock to divest.
Linda McMahon was gifted the same roughly $826,000 in stock at the same January board meeting as Patel, and also said she wouldn’t accept it. She wrote in a federal ethics agreement that while she had accepted a “$55,200 cash retainer payment for work that I performed in 2024,” she would resign her director position and divest her shares. While she’s done the former, there’s no sign yet of paperwork proving she has divested her stock; she has until June 1 before the 90-day period in which she promised to do so expires.
There’s no sign of paperwork proving Bondi or McMahon have divested their stock.
Bondi, meanwhile, wrote in her own ethics agreement that she worked as a consultant for a company called Renatus LLC, which merged in 2024 with TMTG in a process that Forbes called “drama-filled.” While the shares she received of Renatus’ parent company, Digital World Acquisition Corp, were converted to interest in TMTG during the merger, she wrote in the agreement that she does not “hold restricted stock, stock options, or any other equity interest in” TMTG. She added that she would “divest my interests in Trump Media & Technology Group, as soon as practicable but not later than 90 days after my confirmation.” Thus far, she hasn’t filed any paperwork proving she’s done so; the 90-day window closes on May 5.
Besides Patel, McMahon, and Bondi, other lower-ranking Trump officials also have ties to TMTG. None have explicitly promised to divest their stocks, nor are they legally required to. They include Nunes, who is TMTG chairman and CEO, and now also serves as the head of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. In a TruthSocial post announcing Nunes’ appointment to the position, Trump made it clear that Nunes would simultaneously be “continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group.” Nunes owns roughly $4.4 million in TMTG stock, and the company paid him a $1.6 million salary in 2024, and said it issued an “executive promissory note” to pay him $1.15 million more.
Scott Glabe, who also serves on the intelligence board, owns 297,498 shares of TMTG stock, according to documents filed with the SEC. Kari Lake, Trump’s special advisor overseeing the gutting of the US Agency for Global Media, reported owning a small number of shares of TMTG in 2024, when she unsuccessfully ran for a Senate seat in Arizona. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino has also been associated with the company, serving as a board director from February 16, 2023 until March 25, 2024, the month the company became publicly traded. He also had a $240,000 consulting contract with TMTG in 2024, plus expenses, received a $600,000 retention bonus, and holds a promissory note with the company worth $4 million, according to a TMTG SEC filing.
Divesting business interests before taking public office used to be fairly standard; a 2023 review of the Biden Administration’s compliance with divestiture and other ethics rules by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found most senior Biden officials not only exhibited a “high” degree of compliance, but offered “examples of cabinet members going beyond required divestiture.” Trump administration officials and Trump’s own family, meanwhile, have not shown the same scruples, with predictable results: during Trump’s first term, for instance, Jared and Ivanka Kushner earned some $640 million in outside income while serving in official White House roles. At the time CREW recommended that cabinet members and senior White House staff should be banned from “owning and trading individual stocks and from retaining personal interests in family businesses that could make them susceptible to influence-peddling.”
TMTG is unlikely to become a broad source of personal enrichment, primarily because it’s losing money. But as Politico has noted, the company gives “corporate interests and foreign actors” a route to influence the administration by purchasing shares or entering into other business relationships with TMTG.
Trump’s social media company is yet another way, Accountable Tech argues, that Trump has invited and furthered the perception that his presidency is for sale.
“The unprecedented situation of President Trump rewarding investors and executives in his media company with administration jobs sends a clear message to the wealthy, corporate lobbyists and foreign interests that the road to influence in the United States runs through Trump Media,” Accountable Tech executive director Tony Carrk told Mother Jones. “No one should be surprised that President Trump’s first weeks in office have been about removing barriers to corruption and dismantling oversight, not about lowering costs for working families. Trump cares more about lining his own pockets and his wealthy friends’ than putting money back into yours.”