Trading firms are now paying Trump Media a monthly fee for a direct pipe that delivers President Trump’s Truth Social posts to their computers a fraction of a second before those posts appear to everyone else. The company told analysts on its first-ever earnings call Monday evening that it has signed more than 10 customer agreements, mostly with high-frequency trading firms, and that those customers are paying between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for the feed, known as an application programming interface. The head start is measured in split seconds, and it puts the buyers ahead of ordinary retail traders.
That sliver of time is the entire product. Wall Street’s largest trading desks run algorithms that read incoming text and fire off orders automatically, without a human touching a keyboard. Getting the information a few seconds earlier can translate into very large profits for those systems. And the president’s posts are unusually valuable raw material, because he uses the platform to announce policy before it reaches a press office. His statements on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz have moved oil, and his 2025 tariff announcements first knocked stocks down and then pushed them back up when he softened the measures.The service, called Truth API, went live on August 1 and provides low-latency licensed access to publicly available posts from certain top Truth Social accounts.
The company has said the feed carries posts from the platform’s 10 highest-ranking accounts and delivers them in milliseconds. Rival social networks also license data feeds to traders; what makes this one different is that the account generating the market-moving material belongs to the sitting president, and the company selling the feed is owned by him.
For Trump Media, the money matters. The company reported second-quarter revenue of $1.7 million, up 89 percent from $0.9 million a year earlier, alongside a net loss of $238.1 million, most of it non-cash items including $190.4 million in unrealized losses on digital assets and equity securities. Operating expenses came down 44 percent from the first quarter to $165.2 million, and the company pointed to a strong cash position, but investors sold the stock anyway, sending shares down 6.57 percent to $3.70. Total assets stood at $2.0 billion at the end of the quarter, with roughly $1.9 billion in financial assets.
Set the API contracts against those numbers and the appeal is obvious. Ten customers paying $60,000 to $100,000 a month works out to somewhere between $7 million and $12 million a year — several times what the entire company brought in over the past twelve months from advertising, streaming subscriptions and fund management fees combined.
The audience for the underlying platform, meanwhile, keeps shrinking. Truth Social drew 261,300 daily active users in July, down 40 percent from a year earlier, according to figures the research firm Similarweb provided to CNN, while X averaged 123.5 million daily users in the same month. The value being sold is not reach. It is speed of access to one man’s keyboard.
That is where the objections start. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have asked federal regulators to examine whether the arrangement is legal, writing to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins that handing early access to Wall Street firms and high-frequency traders will damage confidence in the basic fairness of the markets. A former senior SEC official, Boston College law professor Renée Jones, has argued that information of this kind belongs to the government and the public rather than to a private company.
Securities lawyers are less certain the practice breaks any rule. Robert Frenchman, a partner at the firm Dynamis, told Reuters the service does not appear to violate federal securities law, since a technology platform is generally free to sell its distribution in tiers even if the result strikes people as unfair.
That gap between unfair and illegal is what any fix has to close, and there are only two realistic routes. Regulators can act — the Warren-Schiff letter is a request for the SEC to determine whether selling accelerated access to presidential announcements crosses into market-manipulation or disclosure territory. Or the White House can neutralize the product by pushing market-moving announcements through official government channels at the same moment they hit Truth Social, the way agencies already release economic data on a fixed schedule to everyone at once. Until one of those happens, the fastest route to the president’s next policy statement carries a price tag.
Trump Media also told investors it expects to complete its prospective merger with TAE Technologies in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory and closing conditions.
JBizNews Desk | Wall Street
© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.
