The CFO of Trump Media and two other executives sold a combined $16 million in stock after the presidential election, according to SEC filings and a report from CNBC. The news comes as social media users contemplate whether there will be any uncomfortable competition between Truth Social and X now that Donald Trump has tapped X owner Elon Musk to run some kind of commission to slash the federal budget by a third.
Trump Media’s chief financial officer Phillip Juhan sold the most stock—320,000 shares at $30.65 per share ($9.8 million) on Nov. 8, and 64,000 shares at 32.97 per share ($2.11 million) on Nov. 11, according to a filing with the SEC. As CNBC notes, Juhan adopted a plan back in August to sell 400,000 shares of stock in the company by December 2025.
Trump Media director Eric Swider sold 136,183 shares at $28.23 per share ($3.84 million, according to a filing with the SEC. And general counsel Scott Glabe sold 15,917 shares at $32.19 per share ($512,368), according to SEC filings. For his part, Trump pledged in a Nov. 8 post on Truth Social that he wouldn’t sell his shares.
Trump is the majority owner of Trump Media, with a 57% stake worth roughly $3.3 billion. He has already said he won’t divest himself of his substantial business holdings before taking office again. The incoming president has downplayed the amount of money that actually exchanges hands while insisting he’s working for the money—precisely the kind of bizarre rationalization that allows Trump to frequently flout ethics rules.
“If I have a hotel and somebody comes in from China, that’s a small amount of money,” Trump said on Fox News during a town hall event in January, according to CNBC. “I was doing services for that. People were staying in these massive hotels, these beautiful hotels, and they stayed there and they paid. I don’t get $8 million for doing nothing.”
The president made a big show of saying he’d transferred control of his companies to his children when he took office in 2017, but reporting in several outlets like Forbes revealed it was largely symbolic. The New York Times reported in January that Trump had made at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments while in office.
Trump has tapped Musk to head what they call the Department of Government Efficiency, shortened to DOGE, which also just so happens to be the name of a cryptocurrency in which the Tesla CEO is heavily invested. Vivek Ramaswamy will run the effort with Musk but there are so many questions about how DOGE will function since presidents can’t unilaterally create a new federal agency.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Trump’s lawyers may try to challenge a 1974 law that blocks presidents from choosing which agencies to fund. But everything is obviously very much up in the air at this point as Trump, a fascist who’s pledged to go after his political enemies, gets ready to take power again.
Musk helped get Trump elected, but there are also questions about how Truth Social and X may co-exist in the social media environment. X has taken a hard-right turn since Musk bought the site when it was known as Twitter in Oct. 2022 and Truth Social was launched as a far-right alternative to Twitter. Now that they’re both simply engines of right-wing radicalization perfectly aligned with the goals of the federal government, it’s hard to see this ending without some kind of conflict between Musk and Trump unless they join forces in that respect as well.
Truth Social has just 200,000 daily active users, according to data from Similarweb and CNBC, which is tiny compared with X’s 36.7 million users. Trump Media didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
