By Allan Sloan

Allan Sloan is an independent business journalist and seven-time winner of the Loeb Award, business journalism's highest honor

The stock of Trump Media & Technology Group hasn't exactly been a great investment since the company went public 13 months ago. Despite recent gains, the stock closed Tuesday at less than half its price at the close of its first day of trading. The stock, which is listed on the Nasdaq, was down 26.7% for this year, more than double the 9.6% drop in the Nasdaq Composite.

Still, President Donald J. Trump, whose initials, DJT, are the company's stock symbol, has been a definite winner, with a stake worth $2.9 billion, held in a revocable trust in his son Don Jr.'s name.

Trump isn't the only person associated with DJT who has done well financially.

Trump Media's CEO, Devin Nunes, was awarded an eight-digit pay package last year, compensation that vastly exceeded the company's total revenue. As a multiple of the company's revenue, Nunes' compensation greatly exceeded that of the CEO of any comparable company.

Nunes represented California in the House of Representatives for nearly 19 years. He was one of Trump's biggest defenders during Trump's first impeachment proceeding, which happened while Nunes was still in Congress. He left Congress in 2022 to become Trump Media's CEO.

Trump Media owns the Truth Social platform that Trump and some associates created after he was kicked off Facebook for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists. It went public through a merger with a blank-check company in March 2024. Trump owned 90% of the company, which valued itself between about $400 million and $1.6 billion before the merger.

(I own one share of DJT to get guaranteed access to shareholder documents. I'll donate to charity any profit that I realize from that stock.)

I've been reading proxy statements since I became a business journalist more than 50 years ago, and don't remember ever seeing a CEO pay package like Nunes' that was so much greater than the revenue of the CEO's company.

Trump Media's SEC filings say the company paid Nunes $47,640,469 last year, when its revenue was $3,618,800.

Nunes' compensation, most of which consists of stock awards, would put him on a recent list of the top-10 most highly paid CEOs produced by research firm Equilar. He was not included because DJT's revenue was below the study's cutoff.

Do the arithmetic and you see that Nunes' package was more than 13 times DJT's revenue. Just the cash portion of his package -- $1.6 million -- was 44% of the company's revenue. (I can't compare Nunes' package to DJT's profits because it doesn't have any profits.)

Dow Jones Market Data assembled a list of companies with revenue in the range of $1 million to $5 million, which is comparable to Trump Media's $3.6 million. The average ratio of CEO compensation to revenue of those 107 companies was 0.9.

To make doubly sure that our take on Nunes' compensation wasn't out of line, I asked Equilar to compare Nunes' package and DJT's revenue to packages and revenue of CEOs of comparable companies.

Equilar came up with a list of 59 companies it considered comparable to Trump Media. The bottom line: Equilar said that none of the CEOs on the list made more than their company's annual revenue.

When I asked Trump Media's spokeswoman about Nunes' compensation relative to the company's revenue, I got the following email: "Transparent hit pieces like this one, arguing that it's a scandal that Trump Media tries to pay its officers competitive salaries based on recommendations and approvals by compensation consultants, board members, lawyers, and others, are laughably predictable inanities that are read by few people and believed by even fewer."

I asked the spokeswoman several times to tell me who the compensation consultants were so I could talk with them. I got no response.

So, we'll just have to let the numbers speak for themselves.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 02, 2025 21:30 ET (01:30 GMT)

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