According to a report filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, former President Donald Trump got 36 million additional shares of Trump Media Technology Group on Friday.
The shares were part of a contractual “earnout bonus” agreed to by Trump’s eponymous media company just before its March IPO.
Trump’s newly granted shares were worth almost $1.8 billion at Tuesday’s closing price of $49.93, but he is unable to sell them until a six-month lockup period expires.
The additional shares increase Trump’s stake in the newly public business to 114,750,000. At Tuesday’s closing price, their paper value exceeded $5.7 billion.
Trump’s windfall comes as Trump Media’s stock price has skyrocketed 50% in the last seven days, following weeks of steep falls since its Nasdaq launch on March 26.
The shares were handed to Trump as a reward for maintaining the stock price over $17.50 for 20 consecutive trading days.
The contract was originally written with three benchmarks spanning 36 months and given in portions of 9 million shares at a time. However, the stock price was never in any danger of missing any of them, thus all three tranches, totaling 36 million shares, were distributed at once.
When CNBC contacted Trump Media staff last week, they declined to confirm or deny that Trump would get the stock; nonetheless, Tuesday’s simple filing serves as confirmation.
The former president was already the company’s largest stakeholder, and it owned the Truth Social app, a social media network built to house Trump and his fans after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.