Newsmax CEO Ruddy to Greta: It's Not Share Price, It's the Company

Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said Tuesday that though his company's debut on the New York Stock Exchange, with a 1,564% surge in share prices in two days, is "pretty significant," he remains focused not on the share price but on the growing the news operation.

"Some people are saying we broke recent records [for the] New York Stock Exchange," Ruddy told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." 

"There's occasional stocks that do as well. Greta, I think this just proves the American people really like your show. They like Newsmax. They trust us. They value us, and they're encouraging us to grow more."

Ruddy added investors, he believes, are signalling they want "more balanced media in this country."

He added, "I don't want to focus myself on the share price. I want to focus on building the company."

Newsmax Inc.'s Class B common stock began trading under the symbol "NMAX" at $14 a share Monday morning and closed the first day at $83.51 a share, a jump of 735%. 

On Tuesday, shares opened at $125.98 and closed at $233 a share, with more than 6.5 million shares traded. 

At one point Tuesday, Newsmax Inc. had a market cap of more than $20.8 billion, an 181% increase over the more than $7.4 billion market cap it had at the close of Monday trading.

Ruddy chuckled as he called Newsmax's success a "25-year overnight success story."

"I've been doing this for a long time," he said. "It's a 25-year-old overnight success story. We were there in the beginning of the dot-com [boom].

"Newsmax was one of the pioneers online. Remember, Salon was a big one. Slate. There was the Drudge Report, Newsmax. And at that point, people had high expectations. And then there was the dot-com crash, and then we just plodded along every year."

Ruddy continued telling Newsmax's story:

"We kept growing. We became an influence on Newsmax.com. Very influential. And then in 2014 we said, hey, let's do a TV channel. … 

"My view was that America, you know, on the center-right, there's only Fox News. 

"And I didn't think there should just be one cable channel serving half the country. And I think the American people agree with us on this."

The American people appear to agree with surging TV ratings and online viewership allowing Newsmax to keep growing the company even during a perilous time for most media organizations.

"I think quarter after quarter, we've been really leading all of the cable networks in ratings growth typically and consistently now," he said. 

"We're up over 600% in cable audience in the past five years. It's a very big number in what has been a declining market.

"And then our streaming channel, which is on Newsmax2 on these free platforms like Roku, that's growing tremendously. Millions and millions of people are tuning in. So, we're growing. We're growing. That's why we're hiring. That's why we have more people."

The organization raised $75 million in its initial public offering at $10 a share under Regulation A+, as well as $225 million in a private preferred offering, which closed in February.

Newsmax launched its cable news channel in 2014 and it now reaches over 30 million Americans, making it 4th highest-rated cable news channel and a top7 cable channel overall.

Last year the Reuters Institute global survey on media reported that Newsmax was one of the top 12 news brands in the U.S. 

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