ByKevin T. Dugan,
staff writer at Intelligencer, who covers money and business
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Trump Media & Technology Company has an HR problem. The parent company of X knockoff Truth Social, which is majority owned by the former president, recently saw two of its C-suite executives leave, hardly more than a month before Election Day. Andrew Northwall, the chief operating officer, said in a lengthy post he was “returning to my entrepreneurial journey, where my heart truly lies.” Sandro De Maerta, the chief product officer, noted in his profile that he is now no longer holding that position. According to ProPublica, the departures are related to whistleblower complaints about another executive, the former congressman and Trump acolyte Devin Nunes, over alleged mismanagement — including the hiring of foreign firms and squandering the company’s money. All of this is likely to keep dragging the company — and Donald Trump’s personal fortune — down even further.
ProPublica says that it hasn’t seen the whistleblower complaint, but it has talked with a few people who are familiar with it. The complaints “revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes. One person said they include allegations of misuse of funds, hiring of foreign contractors, and interfering with product development,” according to the report.
After the complaints were made, lawyers met with some employees who later left, including an HR director and a product designer. Those people were then asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement, though it’s not clear how many actually did. (A Trump Media spokesperson said that the ProPublica report “utterly fabricates implications of improper and even illegal conduct that have no basis in reality.”)
Of course, Trump Media has been mired in scandals practically since it came into existence. The nature of these departures, though, points to bigger problems. Misusing funds is a vague term — something that could describe lavish, but perfectly legal, perquisites. But it could also point to fraud. (And to be clear, though fraud allegations have been endemic to Trump Media since its founding, extending even to its auditor, no one has, as of right now, accused this behavior as fraudulent.)
The reality is that these kinds of complaints tend to get noticed by regulators and investigators, who have the right to rifle through every email and piece of paper ever created by the company, since it trades publicly. The Securities and Exchange Commission has already sued the company over its co-founder’s public statements, and if Nunes, the CEO, really has been squandering the company’s money, the federal government may try to clean house. Of course, investigators may want to avoid that because of the political implications — and certainly, if Trump wins, the odds of a serious probe into the company go down.
Trump Media’s public filings already show that the company is hemorrhaging money, all while selling ever more shares into the market — the kinds of conditions that, under normal circumstances, would cause a company’s share price to plummet. According to Forbes, the decline in Trump Media’s share price has already shaved off more than $2 billion from Donald Trump’s recent peak in his personal fortune.
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