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At 6:23am on Monday, March 23, at which point the United States and Israel had been at war with Iran for nearly a month, Donald Trump posted an all-caps missive on Truth Social. “I AM PLEASED TO REPORT,” he wrote, that over the weekend the countries had engaged in “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” about a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES.” Iranian officials denied any talks had taken place. Even so, when US markets opened a couple of hours later, the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all jumped, and global oil prices fell from more than 112 dollars a barrel to less than a hundred. Trump’s post—on the platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), of which Trump is the largest shareholder, with a stake worth 1.1 billion dollars, via a trust controlled by his oldest son—was disseminated by the news media, and seemed to achieve its aim.

Since Truth Social went live, in February of 2022, TMTG has done some things we might expect, including positioning itself as a right-wing media behemoth in the making: Last July, the company started a streaming platform, Truth+, allowing “Patriot Package” subscribers to access, for $9.99 a month, “non-woke movies,” “Christian content,” and live news programming from Newsmax and One America News. (When the New York Times questioned if there was a conflict of interest in the company doing business with these news organizations, which are credentialed members of the White House press corps, a TMTG statement attacked the Times as “corrupted, debased and perverted by its own political bias.”) Last August, Truth Social added an AI search tool, powered by Perplexity. When I gave it a spin, the AI kept crashing. But in answer to one of my queries—“What’s the latest news on the Iran war?”—all ten sources the chatbot cited were from Fox News. This is, bugs aside, likely the aim: a right-wing alternative to the AI giants of Silicon Valley, many of which, in the eyes of MAGA devotees, come with the scent of liberalism. Truth Social “does seem to be successful in enabling the president and his administration to circumnavigate traditional press and dictate the terms of their own messaging,” Hank Teran, the chief executive of Open Measures, an open-source platform that helps researchers monitor online harms, told me. 

Then there are the company’s off-the-wall moves. In January of 2025, TMTG announced its expansion into financial technology, with Truth.Fi, and later announced its own investment funds—“America First” exchange-traded funds, or EFTs—and the creation of an app currency. This was known as Truth Gems, which could be earned through activity on Truth Social and then converted into a cryptocurrency. (The app features a “Gems Leaderboard.” The top account seems to be a Texas-based QAnon believer.) TMTG also said last year that it was raising 2.5 billion dollars to stockpile Bitcoin holdings, which coincided with the Securities and Exchange Commission, during Trump’s second term, taking a lighter touch with crypto regulation. It’s just one part of a growing Trump family crypto empire.

That was all followed, in December, by TMTG’s announcement of a planned merger with TAE Technology, a nuclear fusion company, in a deal worth about six billion dollars, to close by the end of 2026. (Neither company responded to a list of questions about the latest on the deal.) Scientists have been trying to harness fusion for decades—it has the potential to generate cheap, abundant, and carbon-free electricity, but the technology is still nascent—and tech billionaires have started investing millions in commercial firms. TAE reportedly went for the merger because it needed cash. The incentive for TMTG appears, simply, to be a hunt for profit. Meanwhile, Trump, as president, has pushed to build more nuclear power plants and supported the commercialization of fusion power, establishing, this past November, an Office of Fusion within the Department of Energy. These investments—at the intersection of business and politics—might be viewed as strategic or, depending on your taste, corrupt. If—and it’s a big if—these ventures prove successful, Trump, as TMTG’s controlling shareholder, might see his megaphone turn into a cash machine. 

But business wise, to use language the president often hurls at newspapers, the company is failing. TMTG’s 2025 SEC filing recorded a net loss of more than seven hundred million dollars, recording only 3.7 million in revenue. The company’s stock price, now trading at around nine dollars a share (ticker symbol: DJT), has tumbled 85 percent since the day it merged with a shell company, in March of 2024, in order to join the Nasdaq index. This has erased billions from Trump’s paper net worth. On Truth Social, activity has fallen far below the early projections for eighty-one million users by 2026; according to Similarweb, a firm that monitors traffic, in March the website received 22.5 million visits, and users stayed less than four minutes on average before clicking away. (For reference, in the same month, X received 4.4 billion visits, with a thirteen-minute average dwell time.) Amid its burn through cash, the company abruptly announced in late April that David Nunes—its chief executive, and a former Republican congressman—was exiting his position, to be replaced by an interim CEO, Kevin McGurn, a former boss at Hulu and Vevo. And TMTG even suggested it may spin off Truth Social into a separate company when the fusion merger is realized. 

Still, if TMTG continues to attract investment, poor metrics may not matter, at least for now. Truth Social is “not a huge platform if you look at the audience size,” Yini Zhang, an assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo State University, who has researched the site, told me, “but that doesn’t mean that its influence is small.” Alongside Trump’s rambling press conferences, Truth Social is still a helpful place for reporters to see, in real time, what he’s thinking, what show he’s tuned in to, what internet slop he’s consuming, which country he’s threatening. But the clock is ticking.

I last reported on Truth Social for CJR shortly after the 2024 presidential election, when hype from Trump’s win papered over the company’s fundamentals. Sarah Jones, a senior writer covering politics for New York’s Intelligencer, told me at the time that “Truth Social is going to remain relevant as long as Trump is around, as much as we might want to turn a blind eye to it.” When I checked in with her this week, she was less than confident about its long-term prospects. “The biggest draw for Truth Social is Donald Trump—that is just how it is—and his appeal is because he’s the president,” she said. One day that will no longer be the case. “The question on a lot of journalists’ minds right now, including mine, is what happens to MAGA after Trump? That question seems pertinent to the future of Truth Social, potentially,” Jones told me. “It’s hard for me to see a path forward after Trump for that particular platform.”

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