For many investors, Trump Media & Technology Group has been a disaster. Since peaking at $79.38 in March, the stock has cratered 62%, to $29.95, even after a recent resurgence. Trump Media, having already burned through $58.2 million in 2023, reported a further $16.4 million quarterly loss in August, half of which it attributed to legal expenses. Yet the company has been a cash cow for at least one former dairy farmer: CEO and former Congressman Devin Nunes
Since leaving the House of Representatives to take over Trump Media in January 2022, Forbes estimates that Nunes has raked in roughly more than $2 million in salary, $600,000 in cash bonuses and shares worth another $3.2 million. He’s even pulled in some $230,000 in housing stipends on the company dime, according to an analysis of public filings. Add it all up and Forbes estimates that Nunes has made roughly $6.3 million, about 13 times as much money running Trump’s tottering social-media company than he would have made if he stayed in Congress.
Nunes was earning $174,000 as a ten-term member of the House, representing a rural California district, when Trump tapped him to be the CEO and a director of Trump Media—the parent company of Truth Social—in December 2021. “Congressman Devin Nunes is a fighter and a leader,” Trump said in an announcement at the time. “Devin understands that we must stop the liberal media and Big Tech from destroying the freedoms that make America great.”
Nunes, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in the chamber, resigned on Jan. 1, 2022. His contract with the former president’s firm took effect the following day. Prior to helming Trump’s company, the business experience of the then-48-year-old Republican appears to have been limited to working on his family’s dairy farm. But Trump Media thought........