“Morning Joe” echoed IAC chairman Barry Diller’s sentiments after he called the stock prices associated with Trump Media a “scam.”
On Thursday, Diller spoke with CNBC about the “dopes” purchasing high-flying stock in Truth Social. “They’re buying it for other reasons, just like they bought theaters when there was no theater business or bought GameStop,” he said.
A day later, MSNBC hosts Stephanie Ruhle and Donny Deutsch voiced their admiration of Diller’s direct approach.
“When we’re talking about the truth, nobody likes to go on TV and drop a truth bomb like Barry Diller does,” Ruhle said. She then pointed out how Trump’s inflation of the stock by word of mouth clashes with the true valuation of Trump Media.
“This company is absolutely not worth what it’s currently valued at, where it’s at on paper. What’s happened that’s interesting, in the last 24 hours, is Donald Trump is now pumping it up on his platform,” Ruhle explained. “Donald Trump’s entire universe is talking up his game, but now that he has got a public company, he could get himself entangled in huge problems with the SEC. So if he’s out there talking about this company, how great it is, how awesome it is, and that is materially different from the actual underlying fundamentals of his company, he could sit with shareholder lawsuits, the SEC could come after him.”
Ruhle also detailed how Trump could extricate himself from all the trouble that the false promotion could cause.
“It’s gonna be really interesting to see how he plays this, but I would make one other point. It shows kind of how maniacally clever this operation is. He’s not actually on the board of the company,” she noted. “So a CEO of a company — Jamie Dimon cannot come out and pump up JP Morgan and say anything that’s not 100 percent true, because they’ll come for him. But Donald Trump, who owns 60 percent of the company, and who’s suing his cofounders because he thinks he should own more is not an officer of the company. So he may have actually found a loophole for himself or he gets all the upside and none of the downside, a true Trump’s special.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” video, above:
