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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll begin today with the intersection of two stories from the stock market from the last few days that have not just economic, but political and cultural implications. They are both about social media sites going public, that is being publicly traded as stock offerings now. As some of you already know, users of Reddit and Truth Social, Donald Trump's social media company, can now go beyond posting on their favorite internet communities and own a bit of the pie.

Now, in going public, Reddit is seeking to grow its pool of cash, thus allowing the company to expand by acquiring other businesses, is what we've read, providing new services, and opening a new revenue stream that would sell user data to artificial intelligence companies for training purposes. Controversial enough in its own right. But in this endeavor, Reddit has also ruffled the feathers of its own moderators. Who are the moderators? They are a vast team of volunteers credited for transforming the site into a gem of authenticity. You might say Reddit has taken on a lot of what Twitter used to be before a certain Tesla owner turned it into an economic and cultural dumpster fire.

The fear is that stock-traded Reddit might lose some of what makes it culturally special, but the company does seem likely to offer shareholders a valuable product. The same cannot be said for Truth Social. With its small user base and massive revenue loss last year, the company has fallen into what they call meme stock territory. Its product is essentially Donald Trump, opening a Pandora's box in which we now have to contend with the fact that voters can invest in a presidential candidate, or you might call it a donation if the company loses money on the stock market.

Let's start today by looking at these two social media companies, their performances thus far after a number of days on the stock market, and the broader implications of these events. Joining us now is Felix Salmon, chief financial correspondent for Axios, host of the Slate Money Podcast, and author of The Phoenix Economy: Work, Life, and Money in the New Not Normal, his book from last year for which he was a guest on this show. Hi, Felix. Always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Felix Salmon: Thanks so much, Brian. I love your show so much.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with Reddit, which went public on March 20th. How has it been doing so far?

Felix Salmon: Spectacularly well, I would say. It's off its highs, but the stock was priced at $34 a share, which everyone thought was crazy high. Like, how on earth could they justify such a high price for the stock? Right now it is trading at almost $48 a share, so much, much higher than that. It is worth about coming on to $8 billion, and just to be clear, this is for a company that is 19 years old, and over the course of those 19 years, has never once turned a profit.

Brian Lehrer: I spoke a bit about Reddit's goals of expanding its business through acquisitions and allowing user data to train AI programs like ChatGPT. Why has Reddit decided to go down those roads?

Felix Salmon: Well, it's a capitalist company, and as a capitalist company, it wants to make money. It wants to have a high share price and its owners want to make money, including Condé Nast, which bought it back in the day and then started selling off shares. So yes, it has lots of bright ideas for how it can make money. It can't lose money forever. It now has $650 million in the bank that it raised in going public, that it can, as you say, use to buy other companies, use to invest in whatever it wants to invest in, and it has lots of great dreams of somehow it will be able to become profitable in the future, but so far, we haven't seen that.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned Reddit's content moderation. New York Times even had a story calling Reddit's IPO a content moderation success story. Can you describe what Reddit does compared to other social media sites? Because, of course, one of the things everybody decries about social media is how so much misinformation gets spread there because there isn't content moderation. What does Reddit do differently?

Felix Salmon: What Reddit has, its secret weapon-- its not so secret Reddit weapon to be honest, is this vast army of unpaid moderators. It's a bunch of forums, and every forum has moderators who put a huge amount of work into making sure that the conversations stay on track, that everyone is being polite, that they aren't spammed by lots of misinformation and disinformation. Partly as a result of that, people become incredibly loyal to Reddit. It has enormous amounts of traffic. One of the reasons it's trading at such a high valuation is because the stock market just can't believe that such a huge website isn't going to be able to make money somehow.

The New York Times is exactly right, that this stands in kind of stark contrast to the more sort of pure social media sites like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, where there might be some sort of professional moderation behind the scenes, but it's hard to keep up with the sheer fire hose of new content. A lot of it is done algorithmically, and it can feel just kind of skeevy and unpleasant when you're on those sites in the way that Reddit just doesn't. Reddit feels like a safe place to hang out most of the time.

Brian Lehrer: 60,000 volunteer moderators is the number I've seen, and that they sweep the site for troubling content every day, but for some reason, all of these volunteer moderators, all of this content moderation poses a threat to the company's success on Wall Street, some people think. Do I have that right?

Felix Salmon: People were talking about that before the IPO, that the moderators and the people who really make the site work might not be completely on board with this idea of being a public company. So far, there's not a huge amount of evidence that they're sort of going on strike. They actually kind of did go on strike a while back over a different change that Reddit made. There's always been this tension between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the moderators. That tension hasn't disappeared, but I don't think it's worse now than it has been in the past.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Reddit was a for-profit company even before going public on the stock market, there was still the profit motive there. I guess I'm not sure if there would have been tension between the volunteer moderators if they were trying to protect something that was sort of the culture of Reddit against those trying to make money off the company, and if that would have been any different three weeks ago than it is now that it's a stock.

Felix Salmon: Yes. The thing they got really upset about was-- I mean, I'm going to bore you to tears, so we're not going to go into it in huge detail, but Reddit basically cut off API access, which we don't need to go into that. But it did make Reddit feel much more like a profit seeking company that didn't want to give things away rather than a free utility on the internet, which is how it feels to a lot of the moderators, but that happened already, and now it's a listed stock. Many of the moderators actually participated in the IPO, bought in at $34 a share. If they still have those shares, they're worth $48 now, so they're all quids in, as we say in England.

Brian Lehrer: Quids in. I guess that would mean bucks on the table in the United States, huh? Listeners, we can take phone calls. Love to get phone calls from Reddit users for people, because Reddit doesn't actually make the news as much as Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. So Reddit users, talk about the Reddit experience and why you like it, what you find there at a community level. There are so many subreddits, as they're called, that create community around different things. Why do you like Reddit? Why do you care about Reddit? Do you yourself act as a volunteer moderator on Reddit ever? Do you care that the company is now being publicly offered on the stock exchange? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Also, who uses Truth Social? Which is the other half of this story about social media companies going public in recent days. Anybody look at what Trump does, who's not like a political journalist who does this for a living? Do you follow Trump? If you're a Trump supporter, a Trump fan, do you follow Truth Social? Do you post on Truth Social? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or maybe anybody in the Wall Street community who's listening right now, what do you think about either of these stocks? Are you recommending that your clients buy or stay away from one or the other or both? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, for Felix Salmon, chief financial correspondent for Axios. 212-433-WNYC. All right, Truth Social, how has that company done so far in the week since it's been on the market?

Felix Salmon: Again, amazing. Truth Social, also a company that has never made money, its losses are huge compared to its revenues. It's kind of, as a company, a very small and very unsuccessful business. As a stock, it is spectacular, it is worth more than $5 billion.The idea was that it would merge into this blank-check-listed company at $10 a share, it's now trading at $47 a share. It's made Donald Trump a clear billionaire. No one's questioning that he now owns a lot of shares that are worth a lot of money. It has become a meme stock that people are trading and buying and selling just because it has the ticker symbol DJT, much more than because they want to own a part of this company. Truth Social, like Reddit, is doing very well on the stock market.

I must come in here very quickly though and just say, when I say very well, I'm saying they're worth $5 billion for Truth Social, $8 billion for Reddit. Let's just put that in context. Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter. People are talking about just the American arm of TikTok, if it was forced to be sold off would probably sell for $100 billion. There was recently an estimate saying that YouTube, if it was spun off, if you valued it just on its own, would be worth $400 billion. So compared to some of the really big websites, these are still tiny.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Peter in Brooklyn, who says he is a big Redditor. Peter, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Peter: Thanks. Yes, I'm really happy to talk about Reddit. I got hooked a few years ago, and what I found is the interaction on the stuff that I post is actually a lot more robust at the local level. There's all these hyper-local Brooklyn, even Brooklyn, particular neighborhoods, they'll have subreddits. As local news dries up, I think this is a place to find what's going on down the block. Why are there all these police there? What's a good-- You can get so specific in the kinds of restaurants or bars that you're looking for, and find communities that you didn't even know you were interested in and that existed. Yes, it's been really fruitful. My fiance actually is on the Wedding NYC subreddit, so it gets that specific, and is able to find tips on cheap stuff, and I think got a dress through it. So, yes, it really [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Do you also, or have you in the past also used other social media sites and find they don't do the same thing in as granular a way?

Peter: Yes, because the Reddits are usually thematic or geographically organized, whereas Facebook, at least at the start tried to create kind of a big tent, and it can get pretty mixed up. Then the Facebook pages and groups seem just a little sketchy and less organized. The community moderation, you can see when the mods take charge. I think that Reddit has done a lot over the past couple of years, especially to clean up and institute some basic standards and hold those mods accountable, which seems to be working maybe.

Brian Lehrer: Peter, thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. Gabriel in Queens, a Reddit user, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gabriel.

Gabriel: Hello, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to echo what the last caller said, which is, Reddit for me just seems like a last bastion on the internet, where you could be free from really vicious search engine optimization, websites selling you things constantly. A lot of websites used to be more like that. Like I used to be a big fan of Yelp, things like YouTube or even Google search just used to get more reliable results, you wouldn't immediately be flooded with links that are trying to sell you things. If you want to find even, like the last caller said, a restaurant on the local level, if you want to find something even important like, "I left the gas on in my apartment," when you google it now, the results are not that reliable. There's immediately a company trying to sell you something. I think the fear is that it becomes a little more financialized and results become less community-driven.

Brian Lehrer: Gabriel, thank you very much. To that last point that that last caller, Gabriel in Queens just made, Felix, how does Reddit make money?

Felix Salmon: This is a very good question. I mean, it does have ads, but not very many, not particularly targeted, and not annoying in the way that they might derail someone who's looking for a reliable answer from an actual human being. That's one of the reasons why, frankly, it has not made money in 19 years. It's been quite good at losing money over the years. One of its great plans right now is that it has a huge amount of content being uploaded every day, people are asking questions, answering questions, being really intelligent humans on the internet in a way that the AI companies really want to be able to ingest real-time information of what intelligent humans are talking about, so they can learn by sort of emulation what an intelligent human looks like and says and is interested in.

One of the hopes is that Reddit will be able to sell that data to AI companies and make money that way. But again, we don't know how much money they'll be able to make that way, whether that will suffice to make them profitable, whether they will be happy with just that much. There's a lot of unknowns in terms of what their plan is to making money.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it's so interesting. It's such a good example of how media companies, if we want to lump these tech companies under the broader heading of media, make money compared to old media accompanies, right? If you're thinking of a cable television station, well, it's very apparent to you how they're making money. The programs break for commercials and commercials in between the programs. With these, maybe there are some displayed ads that people will come across, but there are also these backchannel ways, like using your data, as you were just describing, which might creep people out, or might make people think, "Well, okay, everybody's selling my information for commercial purposes. If they want to make money that way and I don't have to sit through ads, I don't really care." But that's the world we're now living in compared to the old world, right?

Felix Salmon: Yes, and everyone is a media company these days. I wrote this morning about how Chase, the bank on the corner, just set up this subsidiary called Chase Media Solutions, and it's now selling ad space in its app, with special offers which are super targeted. Vizio, the TV manufacturer, just got bought by Walmart for $2 billion, not because it makes any money selling TVs, but because it makes a huge amount of money selling ads on TV. You don't even realize it's the TV itself that's advertising to you. Everyone is media now, and so companies that think of themselves as media companies like Axios, or even WNYC, they're just a drop in the bucket of media companies.

Brian Lehrer: How does that work with Vizio? I hadn't heard of that one before. I know enough about commercial radio and television to know that if you have a local affiliate, let's say, of a network, you're watching some big network show, [unintelligible 00:18:35] the Superbowl, there are national ads that people have bought that the network runs, and then there are what they call local avails, local availabilities, where your local affiliate-- Maybe it's national Fox, but then Fox 5 in New York gets a certain number of minutes per hour reserved to them where they can sell ads and put their local ads in there and make money locally. Now, on television, some of that time would be reserved for the TV manufacturer to place ads, or how would that work?

Felix Salmon: Exactly. I mean, it's wild, but you absolutely got it 100% correct. When you buy a Vizio TV, you do not need to plug in a cable box, you do not need to plug in a Roku or an Apple TV or anything like that. You can just connect the TV directly to the Wi-Fi, and it will serve you up a whole bunch of programming for free. That free programming, because it's coming straight through the TV and the software that is built into the TV, basically, Vizio becomes the media company. It becomes effectively like the local affiliate that is providing you that content, and in return for showing you that content, it takes its cut in the form of however many ad minutes per hour.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Danny in Williamsburg, a Reddit moderator. You're on WNYC. Hi, Danny.

Danny: Hi. Happy to be here. I just wanted to talk about how Reddit kind of changed my life in some ways. Reddit is interesting, because I've seen people on Reddit, and they are finding new ways to make money with the premium subscription model you can pay to not see ads. They've also been doing their version of Clubhouse, Reddit talks, which they sunset a year ago. Overall, it is a great place to share information. I've seen a lot of YouTubers or people on TikTok take some of the information from Reddit and make content that does millions of views. I became a moderator, and it was interesting to see just how much work it is for something that isn't paid, and all of the drama you have to deal with to curate the conversation that you want to curate. It's a relatively small subreddit, but not that small. It has about 12,000 subs, and man, the stuff that goes on in the back end is pretty crazy, from moderators clashing-- You would think this was like a Fortune 500 company. We argue with each other, but yes.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give us an example?

Danny: Basically, there's this-- Let's say there's a subreddit with a million people. Sometimes some of the moderators may not like how that subreddit is run, so they create an offshoot. The one I do is for a podcast, The Joe Budden Podcast, and I created an offshoot of it because I got kicked out of that one. Eventually, there was like a schism, and what you see is a lot of the subreddit communities that exist sometimes are offshoots of other subreddits. That's what's cool about Reddit, is that you eventually find a community, and it's curated the way you want it to be.

You see a lot of people be at odds and not like that a certain topic can't be broached. Yes, the admins do a good job, but overall, I think what's great about Reddit now is that it seems like they're trying to get into content creation where they allow creators to curate a dialogue with their community. Sometimes when I look at the Reddit user interface, it looks like YouTube and the way they share videos. They even did live streaming of video a year ago, which they also sunset, so they're trying new things every day.

Brian Lehrer: That's all really interesting. When you moderate, what do you find yourself having to do? Is it taking down objectionable content or fact-checking things for misinformation? What do you actually find yourself doing as a moderator?

Danny: Well, I think for me, actually it's not as cool as that, even though that is pretty interesting. It's really people promoting themselves and sharing content about their music like, "Hey, check out this song." There are times when things get a little dicey like-- I know we're a podcast subreddit, so we have to be careful of things like, let's say Israel/Palestine, sometimes that topic will be broached on something as minor as The Joe Budden Podcast. Things that are off-topic are things we try to monitor, and those can kind of go left and have community members at arms. You get really insulting messages on the back end, you have to mute people. People are really, really mean to Reddit moderators in a way that it's hard to comprehend. There's attempts to reveal people's identity and stuff like that, but it seems like Reddit itself is navigating away from that anonymity sometimes where maybe they want people to share who they are more so than in the past for the company they're becoming.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, people certainly feel more licensed to be mean when they think they can be anonymous. One more question, and I appreciate all your time. Is there any possibility, now that Reddit has gone public, that all you volunteer moderators will try to unionize or ask to be paid?

Danny: I can only speak for myself. I know-- I think like the guest you had on, the bigger thing that happened with Reddit was what he mentioned with the APIs, so this going public thing isn't really any skin off the back. I believe that them offering the IPO at $34 is a sign of good faith, because no other company to my knowledge that I've used, like Twitter or Facebook, has done something that cool. So as far as me, Danny from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I have no issue. I'm sure other Redditors, because a lot of Redditors have opinions, will have an issue, but me, I don't know, I think Reddit is doing good with its [unintelligible 00:24:32].

Brian Lehrer: Danny from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, call us again. Thanks for this.

Danny: Thank you

Brian Lehrer: Felix, anything on that call?

Felix Salmon: No, I think Danny is right. Broadly speaking, this IPO has obviously made a bunch of people rich. One of the interesting little quirks of it is that the individual with the largest single shareholding, the single largest individual shareholder in Reddit is actually Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, for reasons that go back many years. He led a couple of rounds in Reddit back in the day, and now he has a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Reddit. That shows a little bit about how plugged in Reddit is into the AI ecosystem.

He's obviously very good at making money, and he's running around the world saying he wants to raise $7 trillion for AI, and Reddit is like a rounding error to him, but it has become now-- I think now that it's public, it has become this slightly more visible to the outside world. It was always very popular for people on Reddit, and then people who weren't on Reddit were kind of a bit confused about what it was or why they'd want to use it or whether it even existed. It's not a part of the general consciousness in the way that something like Twitter is, but now that it's done this IPO, people are like, "Oh yes, that's the stock. I can buy it. I can put it in my portfolio, and I can make a bet on the nice social network doing well."

Brian Lehrer: Let me take one more caller from a Reddit user who's actually going to be a little critical of it as well, I think. The only caller like that that we would've had. Then we'll go back to the other social media company that just went public on the stock exchange that this segment is also about, and that's Truth Social. But first, Rich in Huntington, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rich.

Rich: Hi, Brian. Big fan of your show. I am a heavy Reddit user. I like Reddit, but I find a lot of the subreddits get over-moderated, and as a result become kind of like echo chambers. That's part of using Reddit, is getting frustrated with moderators. I mean, there are a couple of big ones, World News and Politics, which are really the worst of the worst. World News, I was banned one time from there just for harmlessly criticizing Justin Trudeau. If you are not in sync with the opinions on World News, the moderators, you get cut, and it makes it less interesting. I mean, if you know, if it's predictable what everybody's opinions are going to be on the subreddit, yes, okay, you can go there to see what other like-minded people are thinking, but there's no back and forth that's honest. It's all biased.

With World News right now, for example, what's going on there is, you would think the posts would be from the IDF. I mean, it's so pro-IDF, you cannot get through any other opinions there. It's difficult, and you start thinking that the people posting are working for the IDF or are bots or something like that. The other one is Politics, which is a huge one. I think it has like 31 million subscribers, and that is just Democratic Party establishment. Progressive ideas get voted out and you get cut out. Anything other than, "Joe Biden is the greatest, and Hillary Clinton is the greatest," those get thrown out, so you end up with these echo chambers.

The previous caller saying how then you make these offshoots, that's true. That's the way things go, but many times, those offshoots, if they ever become popular, then they become echo chambers. It's kind of this never-ending cycle. It can be at times a bit discouraging because every subreddit sooner or later matures and becomes quite boring because the moderators make it so in order to enforce their own political perspective.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting perspective from you, Rich. Thank you very much for calling. Felix, I don't know if you have anything by way of an observation of your own on that. You're more of a finance reporter, but I thought-- without really being a denizen of politics sites on Reddit, I thought there was a lot of conservative sites. I would've guessed that there would've been pro-Palestine sites as well as pro-Israel sites, but I don't know.

Felix Salmon: Oh, there absolutely are. You can find a subreddit which is conservative, which is liberal, which is progressive, which is pro-Palestine, which is probably pro-Russia. There's a subreddit for everyone. There are many subreddits for everyone, but one of the things the caller said which is true is that what you often don't find is a lot of argument and debate within those subreddits. That's one of the things that's both a feature and a bug, right?

One of the reasons why people like it and one of the things that distinguishes it from the complete chaos of something like Twitter or Facebook, where everyone's just throwing mud at each other the whole time, is that you do have these moderators who are like, "We're not here to throw mud. If you want to go off and be conservative, here's a subreddit for you." If what you're looking for is debate, there are definitely subreddits where you're going to find that, but probably not in a very un-moderated way in a Reddit with 35 million members. That is one of the things that people like about Reddit, is that they can go to a big subreddit with 35 million Reddits and not just get sucked into debates.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Back to the Truth Social part of this conversation with Felix Salmon from Axios, right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about the cultural and political, as well as the economic significance of these two recent public stock offerings of social media companies: Reddit, and now we'll talk in a little more detail about Trump's Truth Social. Our guest for this is Felix Salmon, chief financial correspondent for Axios. Felix, you wrote a piece last week dubbing Truth Social a meme stock, M-E-M-E, meme stock. What does that mean?

Felix Salmon: If you remember, in early 2021, a lot of people started getting very excited about a company called GameStop, which was a failing video games retailer, and it suddenly had a valuation of $30 billion on the stock market. It got made into a movie recently called Dumb Money, which you can see on Netflix. That really excited a bunch of people, that you could go on to the stock market and bid up a stock, no matter what the business was like. The stock itself became a little bit like a cryptocurrency. You could just bet on it and hold on to it and hope that it went up, and ideally, stick it to the man who was going short. If there were a bunch of hedge fund managers trying to bet that it was going down, you would take the other side of the bet, and they would lose a lot of money, and you would make a lot of money. It became this fun game that people played at the height of the pandemic in early 2021. It was fueled by stimulus checks. It was a crazy time.

Then interest rates rose, we all got vaccinated, we went back out into the world, and people thought that that was this weird feverish moment in the past, but it turns out, it's still going. DJT, which is this very Trumpy new stock now that is listed on the stock exchange, has become a way for Trump supporters and Trumpists and MAGA types to go out and put money on Trump and watch the stock go up and make money or lose money, or whatever fun thing they can do this week. It's not really buying shares in a company so much as it's playing a fun game on Robin Hood.

Brian Lehrer: Does it mean that people who are buying into Truth Social, by and large, don't necessarily think they're going to make money? They're not putting money down on Truth Social like they would do on regular stocks, they're actually trying to contribute to the Trump campaign, and they're willing to take their losses if the stock crashes?

Felix Salmon: They're certainly willing to take their losses if the stock crashes. They are hoping to make money. The way they are hoping to make money is not by the company becoming hugely profitable, but just by the stock going up. If you buy it at $47 today, and then sell it at $100 tomorrow, that's one way of making money, no matter what happens to the company. What they're hoping is that as the election gets into high gear and Trump becomes dominating the news cycle, everyone will start getting into this sort of Trump fever, and they will bid up the stock for reasons.

Now, to be clear, if you're buying the stock, you're just buying it off another shareholder. None of that money goes to Trump himself, none of that money goes to the Trump campaign. That is not a political donation in any way, shape, or form. But Trump does own more than half of the company, and so if the stock goes up, he becomes richer. In a few months time, in October or so, he will be able to sell his shares, and if the shares are worth a lot of money, then he will be able to make a lot of money selling the shares, and if he wants to, he can take that money and put it into his campaign.

Brian Lehrer: Well, on your podcast, Slate Money, one of your guests mentioned that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm upon being elected president. How can Donald Trump be the CEO of a tech company or own more than 50% of the shares without it being blind, which in this case, it certainly wouldn't be? If he's elected president, wouldn't that be a violation of what they call the Emoluments Clause?

Felix Salmon: I think almost everyone who has studied the Emoluments Clause would say, yes, that would be a violation of the Emoluments Clause, but remember that Donald Trump has violated the Emoluments Clause many times already when he was president the first time around. He owned a hotel that was opposite the White House, and lots of foreign governments would buy hotel rooms, and that money would go straight into his pocket because he was the hotelier. It was very obvious that that was a form of channeling money to the President that would violate the Emoluments Clause, but the Emoluments Clause seems to have no real teeth. So yes, it would arguably be illegal, but I don't think that would stop anyone from doing it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. This six-month window that you just referred to, if I understand it correctly, you were saying, and I think I've seen elsewhere, that Trump can't take money out of the stock offering for six months after it first goes public. That's right, right?

Felix Salmon: That's in the documentation, but let's be clear about this, the board of directors of Truth Social can waive that six-month period anytime they want. The board of directors is Donald Trump Jr. and various other Trump loyalists, so if Donald Trump ever felt like he really needed to sell a bunch of stock urgently, he probably could find a way of doing that.

Brian Lehrer: I see. I was thinking that the timing might have been purposeful to release it around April 1st, so that around October 1st, six months later, he could take a lot of money out to use in the end game of the campaign, but you're saying it's even more flexible than that. By the way, didn't Truth Social shares crash, if crash isn't too strong a word, like 20% on Monday?

Felix Salmon: Yes. The company came out with an earnings report, and apparently, the earnings do matter a little bit, because they caused the stock to go down from $60 a share or so to $50 a share or so. That is a large decline. There were lots of headlines saying, "Trump has just lost a billion dollars," which is true, but this is a very volatile stock. Meme stocks by their nature are very volatile. If they can go up a lot, they can go down a lot, and so seeing the stock go up or down by 20% or even more in a day is kind of to be expected.

Brian Lehrer: We just have like 20 seconds left, but does Truth Social make money in some of the same ways as you were describing Reddit making money earlier? Is Donald Trump's social media company selling our data if we're on Truth Social to AI firms and things like that?

Felix Salmon: I don't think they're nearly as sophisticated enough to ever work that one out. Right now, they're barely making any money at all. They have almost no revenues. They had like $50 million of losses on $4 million of revenues. Right now, they just chugging along with a very open source bare-bones website and app, and they're happy to lose money on it for the time being because they're making a lot of money in the stock market.

Brian Lehrer: Felix Salmon, chief financial correspondent for Axios, host of the Slate Money Podcast, and author of The Phoenix Economy: Work, Life, and Money in the New Not Normal. Thanks as always.

Felix Salmon: A great pleasure.

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