Newsmax’s second-day performance was one of the strongest ever for a newly minted stock

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and arguably the top adviser to the Trump White House, participates in an interview with Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt in February. Newsmax was worth more than Fox Corp. at the close of trading on Tuesday.

The Newsmax IPO was one for the record books.

Priced at $10 per share, the cable TV company closed its first day of open-market trading at $83.51 and its second at $233, after rising as high as $265. That left the stock up 2,230% in its first two days of trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Data from FactSet show the second-day performance of Newsmax, when it surged 179%, was one of the strongest ever for a new listing.

The stock, though, suffered a decline of 77.5% by the end of its third session of public-market trading on Wednesday. The shares dropped another 11% in premarket trading on Thursday.

Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s founder and a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, holds 39.2 million Class A shares through a revocable trust. Those shares each afford him 10 votes each, according to Bloomberg, giving him 81% voting control of the company.

Before Wednesday’s sharp retreat from its nosebleed levels, the right-wing TV outlet had eclipsed the value of Fox News parent Fox Corp. Fox shares similar ownership with News Corp, which owns MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones and Co.

In fact, observed Charlie Bilello, the chief market strategist at wealth-management firm Creative Planning, after Day 2 on the NYSE, Newsmax’s market capitalization, at $32 billion, was higher than those of 235 companies among the S&P 500.

Its trailing 12-month sales of $156 million are not higher than any of those companies — in fact, its sales are 78% below those of the company with the lowest annual sales among the S&P 500, he added.