DJT stock falls another 10%. Could Trump Media’s plunge finally spell the end for SPACs?

As the threat of insider sales continues to hang over investors, shares of Trump Media (Nasdaq:DJT) once again tumbled to new lows on Friday, falling another 10% Monday to hit $12.15 a share, its lowest point as a public company.

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While the parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform does not appear to have made any filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), informing regulators of any significant sales by shareholders who were recently restricted by lockup agreements, Trump Media has been falling steadily for more than a week. Shares of DJT stock have now lost roughly 30% of their value in just the past five days.

It was only six months ago that Trump Media had a valuation of $10 billion. Today, that stands at about $2.5 billion. The share price, meanwhile, has fallen more than 80% since its public debut via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Trump Media is occupying much of the media spotlight lately, due to its ties with the presidential candidate and the possibility that early investors including ARC Global, which sponsored the blank-check firm that took Trump Media public, and United Atlantic Ventures, an entity controlled by two former contestants on The Apprentice, could sell their holdings. (Trump, who owns 60% of the company, has also seen his lockup period expire but has said he does not plan to sell DJT stock.) But Trump Media is hardly the first SPAC to give investors heartburn.

The SPAC implosion

Several well-known companies that utilized a SPAC to go public have run into problems. In 2021, DNA-testing service 23andMe merged with a SPAC to go public, with shares topping $16 that year. Shares now trade for 34 cents, having lost 97% of their value—and last week, the entirety of the company’s board resigned, saying the founder/CEO had failed to produce an “actionable” plan to take the company private after it struggled to make a profit.

BuzzFeed, which joined the Nasdaq in 2021 via a SPAC, is another example. Shares of the SPAC hovered near $40 up until the weeks before the merger with the media company was made official. Today, the stock trades for less than $3—and that number would be a lot worse if not for a 1-for-4 reverse stock split earlier this year that was necessary to prevent BuzzFeed from being delisted.

And, in the past week, BurgerFi, which went public via SPAC in 2020, announced plans to close 19 locations of its titular restaurants as well as Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza. The company’s stock was delisted and no longer trades on the Nasdaq.

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Other notable SPACs that have seen their value vanish include WeWork and Virgin Orbit. In 2023, at least 21 companies that went public via SPAC filed for bankruptcy.

Is this the end of SPACs?

The steady decline of Trump Media’s DJT stock has put SPACs back in an uncomfortable spotlight. While they were wildly popular in 2020 and 2021, they’ve lost a lot of momentum due to high-profile bankruptcies and investors realizing the accompanying risks from a lack of due diligence typical of this alternate method of going public. Quite often, they don’t outweigh the reward, certainly in the long-term.

Earlier this year, the SEC adopted new rules that put more legal liability on both blank-check companies and their acquisition targets to disclose more about their projected earnings.

Despite that extra scrutiny, though, SPACs are not yet totally dead. Some 39% of the total IPOs in 2024 (34 of 88) were via SPACs. That’s well off the pace of the early 2020s—in 2021, for example, 613 of 968 IPOs were via SPACs—but still a considerable percentage.

The SEC is hoping the new rules will protect both those investors and people who see a bandwagon and hop on.

“Just because a company uses an alternative method to go public does not mean that its investors are any less deserving of time-tested investor protections,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler when the new rules were adopted. “[These changes] will help ensure that the rules for SPACs are substantially aligned with those of traditional IPOs, enhancing investor protection through three areas: disclosure, use of projections, and issuer obligations. Taken together, these steps will help protect investors.”

This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com
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