I have little doubt there are many ways. These are a bit harder to directly pull a billion dollars out of, though.

To short, you need to pay to borrow shares. And that’s not easy on a stock like DJT. It has a small float, and since professionals consider it overvalued, the premiums are unusually high. It also has an army of retail fans who can produce surprise spikes, meme stock style.

Hedge funds make their money with trades that are not obvious to everyone, because if they were, they’d be too crowded. “Short DJT” is definitely in that category.

> Surely all the HFTs have enough money to short it and earn money off of it.

They asked their shareholders to disable short loans (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/trump-med...).

Before that, everyone was already shorting to the point of 500% fees. https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240406227/why...

"Based on that data, to short 100 shares of Trump Media & Technology Group at the current price, it would cost between $24,895 and $29,874 a year. That means the stock would have to fall about 1.4% a day just to cover the cost of shorting it. And if the short were held for a year, the bet would still lose about $20,000 to $25,000, even if the stock price fell to $1."

Presidential candidates are allowed to use unlimited personal funds in their campaign.

Trump owns billions of $DJT stock. His lockup period ends well before the election.

The share price can be manipulated at will given enough money, the Saudis have plenty of that, and there’s already a good track record of them using it this way; a $2B investment in Trump’s son-in-law “despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal”, as an example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-in...

Donald Trump's hotels and other businesses accepted more than $7.8m (£6.1m) from foreign governments during his presidency. This is not news.