Lou Basenese, chief market strategist at Public Ventures LLC, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): Truth Social just announced a streaming service. The stock has been tanking, it’s continued to tank. What’s going on here?
LOU BASENESE (LB): Yeah, we’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This is a social media platform that was doomed to fail from the beginning. And I say that because echo chambers don’t scale. And when it comes to social media, it’s all about the size of the network, the number of engaged users. And you’ve seen it from the incubation to now where we’re at today, there’s barely any users on the platform. I mean, maybe 10 million at best. Trump himself has six or seven million followers, compare that to over on X, where he has north of 80 million. So you’re just seeing this as a, it’s a nice business experiment for him. I don’t know that it’s gonna be one of the many that he’s tried in his career that ends up working out, I think it’s become a meme stock temporarily. But you, as you pointed out, the stock’s tanking, right? That meme designation only lasted for a brief moment in time. And I just, I think the shine’s worn off on the appeal of it for some weird reason. Some people think it’s a way to show their support to President Trump. I would argue, why do you wanna just give your money away? Why don’t you actually give it to the political campaign instead of to a company that might just incinerate the capital like it has done, since its inception.
AM: Yeah, that makes sense. People have compared it to a meme stock, but even meme stocks had this run that lasted months backed by the people or whatever. This stock has only been around a couple weeks and it’s already just eating it.
LB: Yeah. And it’s predecessor, before the merger was completed, DWAC went all the way up to I think $90, $92 per share. So you’ve seen that meme mania kick in periodically. Yeah, I just don’t think it has any staying power. I mean, Trump’s gonna do his best Elon Musk impersonation to try and prop up the stock leading through the election. But after that I just don’t see what’s the business case, right? Look at the fundamentals of Truth Social. And there’s just not one data point that I can point to and say, you can build a business on that. I mean, similar to Reddit, Reddit has kind of been pinned at an audience size and just isn’t generating much revenue per user. Truth Social, by the same token, is barely generating any revenue per user. So if you look at these companies on a price to sales basis, which is usual for social media stocks, they are just wildly expensive and losing a lot of money. Reddit’s been around for 19 years, has never turned a profit. Truth Social, if it makes it that long, if it makes it a couple years, it’s never gonna turn a profit either. And this is not a political statement, it’s just a business statement looking at the fundamentals. So it doesn’t matter where you lie politically, if you’re looking at investing, it’s a matter of do the fundamental economic indicators add up to where it would warrant an investment,
Read more: Trump Media announced a live TV streaming platform — and the stock tumbled 13%
AM: The announcement of a streaming service on Truth Social. To me it seems like it’s just ‘insert buzzword here’, positive press, float the stock another day. Do you think that was the hope? Or do they really have grand ambitions?
LB: Look, I think they have good intentions, but executing has always been difficult. I mean, if you look to the beginning of Truth Social, they try to do everything away from Big Tech, away from Amazon. They use Rumble, I think, as their video hosting platform. I think this is just another endeavor of theirs. It’s gonna fall flat like it’s streaming. Yeah, it’s big. Everyone knows that content is consumed in video. That’s why we’re doing this now. That’s the preference. I just don’t see what differentiates them from any other streaming service. Right. What’s gonna bring more eyeballs there? Just adding the video capabilities? I don’t think so. And then, you know, they haven’t had a great track record implementing new tech. So when they first started Truth Social, they had a backlog. I think I was on the wait list, like 500,000 deep while they were trying to roll out the first iteration of it. And then rolling on iOS and Android compatibility. So they’re not tech forward in that sense. So I don’t think the streaming service is gonna be any different.
AM: Yeah, maybe it’s to be more advertiser friendly. Basically as video ads can charge more than, you know, ‘Truth’ ads or whatever. True. They’re not tweets. They’re ‘Truths.
LB: Yeah. Better fact check them.