(Bloomberg) — Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. said it will start a financial-services brand called Truth.Fi — the latest move by a Donald Trump-linked business to push into finance during his presidency.
The new brand, expected to be rolled out this year, will offer investments based on “America-First principles,” with brokerage Charles Schwab Corp. advising on products and strategy, according to a statement Wednesday. Trump Media will also place $250 million — or about one-third of its cash — under Schwab’s oversight, allocated to exchange-traded funds, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and financial vehicles.
The effort thrusts Trump’s money-losing social media company back into the spotlight at a time when the president is already testing the limits of ethical norms. He and his wife Melania introduced a pair of memecoins just before his inauguration that were suddenly worth billions of dollars, which experts said offered Trump affiliates a chance to profit from his return to the White House.
Trump Media’s financial-services push is a high-profile addition to what’s sometimes called the “parallel economy” — an ecosystem of businesses that espouse “liberty”-minded or conservative values, contrasting with what they view as corporate America’s progressive tenor in recent years.
“Developing American First investment vehicles is another step toward our goal of creating a robust ecosystem through which American patriots can protect themselves from the ever-present threat of cancellation, censorship, debanking and privacy violations committed by Big Tech and woke corporations,” Trump Media Chief Executive Officer Devin Nunes said in the statement.
Shares of Trump Media jumped more than 8% at 11:35 a.m. in New York.
Finance Push
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and board member at Trump Media, also sits on the board of PSQ Holdings Inc., which runs an “anti-woke” marketplace called PublicSquare, as well as its own payments platform. Donald Trump last month transferred his shares in Trump Media to a trust that is controlled by Trump Jr. The stake is worth more than $3 billion.
Trump Media had seemed open to the idea of entering finance in some way: Bloomberg News reported in November it was in talks to buy Bakkt Holdings Inc., a crypto platform spun out from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. It was formerly led by Kelly Loeffler, Trump’s current pick to run the Small Business Administration. Shares of Bakkt plunged more than 27% as of 11:35 a.m.
The move into financial services comes just days after Trump called out Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, leveling a surprise accusation about how it treats conservative clients. (The bank said it never closes accounts for political reasons.)
Elected officials including Trump could use their positions to promote financial offerings like Truth.Fi, said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a group that studies corporate influence and ethics in government.
“All of these claims about debanking can be turbo-charged by the executive branch,” said Hauser. “Now he has a vehicle to profit from people believing those things to be true.”
Many details of the Truth.Fi effort, including fees, remain unclear.
Trump Media said an affiliate of Yorkville Advisors would serve as the registered investment adviser. Yorkville Advisors, based in Mountainside, New Jersey, is led by Mark Angelo, who founded it in 2001.
Trump Media has had previous dealings with Yorkville. The two companies entered into an agreement last year that gave Trump Media the right to sell up to $2.5 billion of stock to Yorkville at a slight discount to market prices as a way to raise cash. Trump Media sold almost $340 million of shares in first few months of the deal.
Billionaire Donor
Charles Schwab, the billionaire founder and chairman of the eponymous broker, is a major donor to conservative causes. His granddaughter Samantha is the incoming deputy chief of staff at the US Treasury.
Before her appointment to the Trump administration, Samantha Schwab worked at Kalshi — the prediction market that recently tapped Trump Jr. as an adviser.
Read More: Donald Trump Jr. Joins Kalshi and Hypes Market for Election Bets
A spokesperson for Schwab said the company doesn’t comment on current or former client activities.
Shifting into finance marks a new strategy for Trump Media, which says on its website that its mission is “to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving the American people their voices back.”
Trump Media’s Truth Social has struggled to gain traction with users, even after Trump’s election victory. The social-media platform notched 355,000 daily active users in November, up 3% from the prior month, according to data from research firm Apptopia. Elon Musk’s X had 400 times as many users for the month and Instagram’s Threads had a similar margin, the data show.
The company trades like a meme stock, detached from its fundamental value and instead moving based on individual investor appetite to pump money into it. Trump Media is worth about $7 billion even though it lost more than $363 million in the first nine months of 2024.
The stock has been volatile since going public in March, falling to as low as $11.75 in late September before spiking as high as $54.68 in the lead up to the November election.
Ethicists who voiced concern during Trump’s first administration have said that this time around, having a publicly traded company increases the risks of conflicts — since it’s in many ways more straightforward to contribute to a company tied to the president than it is to stay at a Trump hotel or resort property.