Trump Media shares sink 6% days before lockup restrictions lift

Shares of Trump Media closed down 6.6% on Tuesday, ending the day at $16.14 a share. The dip came just 48 hours before “lockup” restrictions that have so far barred the company’s majority shareholder, Donald Trump, and other insiders from selling their stakes, are set to expire.

Until this week, the former president and early investors who received stock in the company when it merged with a special purpose acquisition company in March and began publicly trading have been prohibited from selling their shares under a “lockup agreement.”

Those restrictions expire Thursday.

Last week, Trump said he would not sell his 114,750,000 shares of the Truth Social owner. As of Tuesday’s close, Trump’s stake was worth more than $1.8 billion.

“I have absolutely no intention of selling,” Trump said at a press conference in California on Friday.

Shares rose as much as 25% after Trump’s announcement, and closed up 11% on Friday.

But Trump Media’s losses so far this week have erased those gains.

The stock closed down nearly 4% Monday, after a weekend during which Trump was the target of an apparent second assassination attempt.

U.S. Secret Service on Sunday opened fire on a man with a semiautomatic rifle hiding on the perimeter of Trump’s Florida golf club, where the Republican nominee was golfing.

The man, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, was arrested after fleeing the scene. He was charged with two federal gun crimes Monday.

The effect on Trump Media stock of the weekend threat to Trump was the opposite of how shares responded to the first assassination attempt on Trump in July. On July 15, the first trading day after the attempt, Trump Media shares closed up more than 30%.

A Delaware judge on Monday also ruled that Trump Media had breached an agreement with ARC Global, an early investor that helped the company go public.

Vice Chancellor Lori Will determined that shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. underestimated the amount of stock that ARC Global deserved following the merger that took Trump Media public.

Trump Media’s slide on Tuesday, which accelerated shortly after 3 p.m. ET, puts the stock just a few cents above its lowest closing level since it debuted on the Nasdaq.

Shares are now down 60% from their most-recent high, which came in July after the first assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The stock is down 75% from its postmerger high in March.

As of Tuesday’s close, Trump Media’s market capitalization stood at $3.2 billion.