Top Trump Media investor cashes out almost all his shares, filings show
A major Trump Media investor sold an overwhelming majority of his shares, according to SEC documents filed on Thursday.
Patrick Orlando, the former CEO of the special purpose acquisition company that took Trump Media public, and his investment company ARC Global Investments now own less than 0.01% of the company after having a 5.4% stake in the company earlier.
The latest filing shows that ARC’s current stake is just 30,147 shares of Trump Media. ARC owned over 11 million shares in Trump Media as of September, according to a separate filing the company made.
The exact date of the sale is not known based on the available documents. However, the event that triggered the filing occurred on Sept. 30.
Orlando was one of the earliest investors in Trump Media, leading the shell company that eventually took it public. He would later fall out with Trump Media’s leadership over how many shares of the company he was due when it went public.
The two parties ended up in a lawsuit over the matter. In September, a judge ruled Trump Media did in fact owe Orlando more shares than it had originally granted him. Orlando subsequently received an additional 8.1 million shares.
That ruling came just days before the lockup period for early investors was lifted on Sept. 19, meaning that Orlando would have been free to start selling his shares shortly after. The judge in the case also ruled that Trump Media had to make arrangements so that Orlando would get the shares in time for the lockup’s expiration. Thursday’s SEC filing shows that Orlando did in fact sell the majority of his shares.
On Friday, shares rallied 4% and have jumped 91% since the lockup period ended as Trump’s election victory sent the so-called Trump trade soaring.
Still, mass sales of stock from investors with significant stakes in the company can worry Trump Media insiders and shareholders because they can signal a lack of confidence and trigger a sell-off. If that were to happen, their own stakes would be substantially diminished. President-elect Donald Trump is Trump Media’s largest shareholder with about 54% of the company.
Trump has repeatedly said he does not intend to sell his shares, which are worth about $3.2 billion, according to the company’s share price at the time of publication.
Orlando and ARC are not the only early investors that have since cashed out their stakes. In late-September, shortly after the lockup deadline lifted, Trump Media’s other two cofounders, Andrew Litinsky and Wes Moss, sold 11 million shares for somewhere between $128 million and $170 million.
Coincidentally, Litinsky and Moss also fell out with Trump, ending up in their own legal battle with the company. The pair were also involved in the process to take Trump Media public. The company contended they had botched the process and “failed spectacularly at every turn,” according to court documents from the lawsuit. Similar to Orlando, the judge in the case ruled in their favor, granting them the shares Trump Media had attempted to withhold.
