President Donald Trump has long understood that the world hangs on his every word, and now he is turning that reality into a business opportunity. Starting Saturday, his Truth Social platform will begin selling fast access to his social media posts through a service called Truth API, giving Wall Street traders who pay up the ability to see his messages before the general public can react. The move raises serious questions about insider trading and whether the president is using public office for private gain, even as his company dismisses critics as opponents of free markets who fail to understand the distinction between public and nonpublic information.
The financial implications are enormous. Trump has repeatedly sent stocks, bonds, and currencies soaring or plunging with his online musings on everything from tariffs to central bank leadership to war. Just this month, he used Truth Social to threaten higher tariffs on Canada, float killing a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, and widen the Iran conflict. Traders with advance knowledge of such posts could have raked in profits by betting on movements in the Canadian dollar, nuclear energy stocks, and oil futures before anyone else knew what was coming. Irene Aldridge, head of Able Alpha Trading, which does not plan to buy the service, put it bluntly: if a corporate CEO did something like this, it would mean jail time.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of Truth Social, insists there is no fairness issue because the information will be released to paying traders and the general public simultaneously. But critics say that argument misses the point entirely. Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, notes that what matters is when posts are received, not when they are released. Firms that pay for the feed and have systems built to process data within milliseconds will always act faster than everyday investors. The loser, Saluzzi said, is always the retail investor.
Beyond policy announcements, another reason traders might sign up has emerged in recent months. Trump has been posting more frequently about individual companies, praising ones he likes in ways that trigger immediate buying frenzies. In April, moments after he praised Palantir Technologies in a post that included its stock symbol, shares briefly jumped more than they had in an entire year. Later that same month, after Trump posted congratulations to Intel for doing a great job, that stock immediately surged in after-hours trading. Dylan Hedler-Gaudette, a federal ethics expert at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group, described the situation as a real mess.
The new revenue stream comes at a critical moment for Trump Media, which reported taking in just $3.7 million last year while posting hundreds of millions in losses. Its stock price has plummeted roughly 75% since Trump took office. If just three firms sign up at the reported fee of $100,000 per month, that would effectively double the company’s annual revenue. Which trading firms are subscribing remains unclear, as none of the best-known high-speed operations responded to requests for comment. But with estimates suggesting around 100 high-frequency firms might be willing customers, the president appears poised to profit handsomely from access to words that already move global markets before they reach everyone else.
