Poetic Justice
Someone really smart once said that the universe bends towards justice. I’m not really sure if the universe bends at all. I’m just a mere cog in the machine of life, so no mysteries have been revealed to me over the years. However, it seems that things in the financial world might be trending that way. I’m certainly not an expert in the stock market or investment game. I let our broker handle our retirement accounts and all of that. However, I can do some simple math and the whole hubabaloo around Truth Social and the parent company that went public just wasn’t mathing as the kids say.
According to reporting, Trump owns 60 percent of the stock and it opened with a 5.1 billion dollar evaluation just for his share. My crack math skills (and fingers on my calculator) tell me that meant that the company opened with an evaluation of around eight billion dollars. It’s been awhile since I taught Economics, so the details might be fuzzy, but it seems to me that eight billion dollars is a lot of money. It seems fantastical that a company that doesn’t really produce anything, is hemorrhaging cash, and losing users left and right would somehow be worth that amount of money. Then again, I thought Elon Musk paid too much for Twitter by a factor of ten.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone in this thought. A stock that opened at 71 dollars a share is now barely over 30 a share in less than two weeks. Now comes the funny part. According to the details of the deal, Trump cannot sell his shares until six months after the company went public. Even then I think there are some rules in place that will make it somewhat challenging. Of course, I am not a corporate lawyer or financial expert, but it seems to me that 30 is less than 71. It also seems that a company that has never actually made money and has nothing really to sell is likely not even worth 30 dollars a share. The stock has been bleeding between five and ten percent value every day it has been traded.
This hammers home two points every red blooded American should understand before stepping into a voting booth. First, the stock market is not a great indicator of the economic health of the nation. For one, most Americans don’t have enough to invest heavily in the stock market. Secondly, there are enough examples of horseshit evaluations like this one to demonstrate that looking to the stock market for any kind of accurate perception of the economy at large is foolish.
The second point is that justice is not swift even in cosmic world of universal justice. Yet, in this case it is almost better. You had to know that when the stock opened up, the orange menace saw the eight billion evaluation and saw dollar signs in his head. He saw all of his financial woes coming to an end. He was finally going to be a big boy billionaire. A stock drop from 71 to 1 would be hilarious, but it is so much better to see it just leak away slowly every day. It allows him to get into the mode of thinking of “if it stays here I can still be a billionaire.” The best news would be for it to reach that mythical worthlessness just one day before he is eligible to sell. That’s cosmic justice. That’s the universe finally bending to whack him on the ass. May it be so.