Newsmax CEO and the famously sober lawyer Rudy Giuliani ring in the bell at the NYSE on April 3, 2025. Moments later the Dow dropped 1,500 points, S&P 500 lost 4%, and the Nasdaq Composite slid 5%. But it didn’t stop these brilliant capitalists from celebrating. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Because God has a sense of humor, today Newsmax rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange.
No, really.
In case you missed it, Newsmax (NMAX) did an IPO on Monday. The stock debuted at $10 a share and jumped to $82 in its first day of trading. I know what you’re thinking: That’s insane!
Newsmax loses money every quarter and has very little revenue. It has ongoing legal exposure. The linear cable industry, of which it is a part, is in a death spiral.
And you’re right. It was insane. But on Day 2 the market corrected itself: NMAX went to $235.
Not a typo! For two days the market cap of Newsmax—a third-tier cable news operation that loses money—was well over $20 billion. For a sense of scale, Newsmax had about the same market value as United Airlines and about half the total market cap of General Motors.
Yay! Capitalism!
Anyway, on Wednesday the stock crashed: NMAX closed at $52. And yet, there was CEO and conservative macher Chris Ruddy on the floor of the NYSE this morning grinning as he rang the opening bell.
It’s the perfect distillation of late-stage capitalism.
A conservative grifter—a guy who first rose in right-wing circles in the 1990s by spreading grotesque conspiracy theories about tragedies, like the suicide of Vince Foster and the crash of TWA Flight 800—becomes a paper billionaire by shamelessly propagandizing for Trump. The market rewards him, even though his company is a money loser in a dying industry. His network spends the week trying to justify the economically illiterate tariff scheme which is blowing up the global economy. His stock crashes. And on the day of reckoning for Trump’s tariffs, as trillions of dollars go up in flames, the business establishment affords this man the honor of opening the market and starting the conflagration.
Good luck, America.
But wait, there’s more . . .
