DJT shares drop after Trump Media announces bitcoin raise

LAS VEGAS — Trump Media on Tuesday announced a $2.5 billion raise from institutional investors to bankroll one of the largest bitcoin treasury allocations by a public company.

Shares of the company closed 10% lower Tuesday.

It’s the latest and most ambitious move in the company’s evolution from a free-speech social platform to a financial services player.

The deal includes $1.5 billion in common stock and $1 billion in convertible notes, with proceeds earmarked for the purchase of bitcoin, which the company will now hold as a core treasury asset. The company said it has subscription agreements with about 50 institutional investors.

The company also confirmed the bitcoin will be held with Anchorage Digital and Crypto.com — the same platform that recently signed a deal to help Trump Media launch its first exchange-traded funds.

The announcement comes as bitcoin nears record highs and the year’s biggest gathering of digital asset enthusiasts gets underway on the Las Vegas Strip: Bitcoin 2025. The conference helped solidify President Donald Trump‘s image as the country’s first “crypto president.”

This year, it’s a full-court press from the Trump White House at the conference, with Vice President JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, crypto czar David Sacks, and other top officials attending.

Trump Media’s stock remains volatile, with shares down nearly 30% this year so far. The company has a market cap of about $5.3 billion, despite reporting just $3.6 million in revenue and a $400 million loss in 2024.

Trump indirectly owns more than 114 million shares of Trump Media through a revocable trust.

Devin Nunes, the company’s CEO and a former California congressman, called bitcoin an “apex instrument of financial freedom” and said this was just the first of many “crown jewel” acquisitions the firm would pursue.

He framed the move as a defensive strategy, saying it would help protect the company from what he described as ongoing “discrimination by financial institutions” against conservative businesses.

The firm has already signed a partnership with Crypto.com to bring a series of ETFs and digital asset products to market later this year, pending regulatory approval.

Those funds will include baskets of crypto such as bitcoin and Crypto.com’s native token, cronos, alongside traditional securities. They will be branded under Trump Media and offered to global investors across major brokerage platforms and on the Crypto.com app, which has more than 140 million users worldwide.

The move deepens Trump’s crypto footprint: World Liberty Financial, another Trump-affiliated entity, has already amassed a significant crypto stockpile, and the president signed an executive order earlier this year designed to establish a bitcoin reserve and a separate crypto stockpile for the federal government.

The…