President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, talks with former Devin Nunes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis., on Wednesday, July 17, 2024.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
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Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.
Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.
The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.
Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.
To be fair to Nunes, he was asked to oversee a company that despite having one of thet world’s most recognizable faces as its power user, had a remarkably scattershot approach to everything.
When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.
Of those grand dreams, under Nunes, Trump Media managed to launch Truth Social and a tepid streaming service, that runs for free and mostly provides content that is also free on YouTube. Truth Social may have as few as several hundred thousand daily active users, while Elon Musk’s X is estimated to have around 224 million. Those kind of numbers place it firmly in 24th place among social media companies, a few spots behind YouTube Kids.
That’s not how things were supposed to go. At its launch, a slide presentation distributed to investors and filed with the SEC suggested that by 2026, the company expected to have about $3.3 billion in revenue, 40 million users on Truth Social and another 81 million spread across the company’s other services.
Under Nunes, the company has, instead, struck out in seemingly random directions. It has, among other things, launched:
- “Personal freedom” oriented ETFs.
- A crypto “token”—a non-tradeable blockchain-based digital asset which, despite having no value, is slated to be given to shareholders and would grant them discounts on the company’s products.
- A Bitcoin treasury: following in the footsteps of controversial Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, Trump Media announced in 2025 that it would begin accumulating as many Bitcoins as possible, based on the theory that Bitcoin’s precipitous increase in value would also make the company more valuable.
The last initiative, which was announced in May of 2025, a few months before a massive decline in Bitcoin prices kicked in, is responsible for most of the $712 million in losses. The company had purchased roughly $2.5 billion in bitcoin, and the latest data suggests that after declines in the price of Bitcoin and sale of some of the company’s Bitcoins, the treasury is now worth just $753 million.
Trump Media’s boldest move under Nunes might have been the idea to pivot to nuclear power—specifically the largely experimental method of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fission, which is the method used for decades, atoms are split, but in fusion, pushing atoms together generates even greater energy—but the process has never been made commercially viable. In late 2025, Trump Media announced it would be merging with TAE Technologies, a longstanding player in the fusion field, which despite having previously secured funding, was still struggling to build an actual power plant.
The merger, which is supposed to be completed in June, would have made Nunes co-CEO of the social media, streaming, web-hosting, financial products, Bitcoin treasury and nuclear fusion company.
All that is a lot of responsibility for Nunes who began his career working on the family dairy farm in southern California in the early 1990s (he has a degree in agriculture). First elected to Congress in 2003 and served for 19 years, including several as the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, where he and one of his staffers—Kash Patel—became two of Trump’s loudest backers in accusing a “deep state” in the intelligence community of having targeted Trump.
Nunes had no specific experience running a technology company before taking over as CEO of Trump Media, but in 2019 he sued political strategist Liz Mair and two anonymous parody Twitter accounts, including @DevinCow, which purported to be one of the cows on his dairy farm, for defamation. Nunes asked for $250 million in damages, but the case was dismissed.
Nunes confirmed his departure from Trump Media but did not say what he would be doing next. He remains chairman of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
