Cable Network Newsmax Soars Into Meme Stock Territory As Right-Wingers Scramble To Scam Their Peers

If you are not familiar with Newsmax, the gist is that it is a cable television network for people who think Fox News is too liberal. On Monday, Newsmax had its initial public offering.

Because we live in hell, the share price soared by more than 1,500% in its first two days of trading. From its opening at $14 per share, by market close on Tuesday intrepid investors were shelling out $233 for a single share of Newsmax stock.

This brought Newsmax’s market capitalization close to $30 billion. In comparison, Fox Corp.’s current market cap is around $24.75 billion, despite having far more viewers than Newsmax (among other cable news channels, MSNBC and CNN also have Newsmax beat when it comes to viewership). It’s not even close either. According to Nielsen data, Newsmax averaged 309,000 prime-time viewers and 211,000 daytime viewers from December 30 to March 20, while Fox News averaged about 3.1 million and 2 million viewers, respectively, over the same period.

In case you were in danger of having this IPO make any sense at all, you should also keep in mind that Newsmax is a money-losing company facing several big lawsuits over the lies it tells on air. Though revenue was up compared to a year prior, the company lost $72 million over the course of 2024, and it is facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for false claims made about the 2020 election. Newsmax also previously settled a lawsuit brought by election tech company Smartmatic for $40 million, $20 million of which it has paid so far. The Dominion Voting Systems case is scheduled for trial later this month. Dominion received $787.5 million from Fox in a similar case.

The concept of a dramatically overvalued meme stock is nothing new. Yet, its latest iteration has taken on a markedly different flavor compared to the early 2021 GameStop short squeeze. At least many of the retail investors hyping GameStop’s security on social media claimed to have a noble purpose: holding long enough to blow up the positions of Wall Street short sellers who’d been pushing around the average Joe for long enough. With Newsmax, it’s become baldly cynical: get in, get out at just the right time so as to leave the guy behind you holding the bag.

There were not a ton of big short positions as Newsmax stock started trading (although there surely are some now that the share price took off like it did). Additionally, any investor would look at an IPO much differently than they’d view a flagging legacy company like GameStop. No, Newsmax is not the next GameStop: it’s the next Trump Media & Technology Group.

Trump Media, owner of the president’s boring social media platform Truth Social, went public last March. Like Newsmax, the only things Trump Media seems to do really well are promote lies and lose tremendous amounts of money. That didn’t stop Trump Media shares from initially surging, albeit at a much more modest pace than those of Newsmax.

Publicly available Trump Media shares peaked two days after their debut at $61.96 on March 28, 2024. They never reached those heights again. At market close on April 1, 2025, a single Trump Media share cost just $20.26.

Sure, Trump inspires an irrational fervor in some of his most ardent supporters, and a portion of the initial surges in both Trump Media stock and Newsmax stock can be attributed to that. Mostly, though, the Main Street traders piling into right-wing meme stocks know exactly what they’re doing.

These people don’t really think that Newsmax is worth more than Fox News with one-tenth the viewership. They do realize, though, that meme stocks can generate a substantial amount of wealth for those who get the timing right — at the expense, of course, of those who don’t.

For there to be a few big winners on a meme stock, there have to be a lot of small losers. If you are a hardcore right-wing news junkie who bought into the Newsmax IPO believing that the share price really should be something like $233, I would recommend that you think over which of these two groups you are in. Don’t take too long though.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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