Trump Media’s $100,000 Fee Echoes a 2013 Wall Street Scandal

Trump Media discussed charging Wall Street trading firms as much as $100,000 a month for the fastest possible feed of President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts, according to people familiar with the talks. A cheaper $60,000-a-month tier is on the table for firms willing to sign up for three years, the people said.

The pricing sits behind Truth API, a licensed data feed the company unveiled Thursday to give banks and trading firms a millisecond head start on the platform’s ten most influential accounts, Trump’s included. Wall Street has paid for exactly this kind of speed edge before. In 2013, a nearly identical scheme got a data giant investigated by a state attorney general within weeks. This time, the person profiting from the sale of early access is the market mover himself.

Trump Media Prices a Speed Advantage at $100,000 a Month

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) has discussed the $100,000 monthly rate with prospective clients over several weeks, along with the $60,000 discount tier for three-year commitments, according to people who described the talks on condition of anonymity because they remain confidential. The Financial Times first reported the fee discussions Thursday.

Truth API is scheduled to launch Aug. 1. It will push posts from ten of the platform’s most followed accounts to paying subscribers within milliseconds, faster than an ordinary push notification on Truth Social, and will include an archive stretching back to the platform’s 2022 launch, giving trading desks material to test how markets reacted to similar language before.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, TMTG’s interim chief executive, said in a statement announcing the service. “As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company.” The company’s press release did not mention Trump by name, even though his account is among the platform’s most followed.

Truth API’s ten tracked accounts include some of the platform’s biggest draws:

• Donald Trump – the president’s own account, whose posts on tariffs and foreign policy have repeatedly moved markets
• Donald Trump Jr. – 7.4 million followers
• Eric Trump – 3.3 million followers
• Devin Nunes – the former congressman who once ran Trump Media, 4.5 million followers
• Dan Bongino – the former deputy FBI director, 3.5 million followers

Trump Media said it has already signed customers ahead of the launch without naming them; Axios reported the early sign-ups include financial news organizations and high-frequency trading firms. McGurn separately told Axios the company is in talks to license Truth Social data to artificial intelligence firms for model training, a second potential revenue line beyond Wall Street.

The demand for speed is not hypothetical. Wall Street’s main indexes turned sharply higher in April 2025 after Trump posted that he would pause most of his new tariffs for 90 days. Markets have kept reacting to his feed since, from a stretch when stock futures wobbled as a Hormuz blockade collided with earnings season to a session when the S&P 500 rallied 1.2% even after Trump declared an Iran truce over. A speed edge of just a few milliseconds on posts like these can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single large trade, the people familiar with the talks said.

The 2013 Scandal Truth API Resembles

Selling a speed edge on market-moving information is not a new idea. It has a direct precedent, and it did not end well for the firm that tried it.

In the early 2010s, Thomson Reuters distributed the University of Michigan’s closely watched consumer sentiment index in three tiers. The general public got the number at 10 a.m. Ordinary subscribers got it five minutes earlier. A group of ultra-low-latency clients, mostly algorithmic trading firms, got it two full seconds before that, at 9:54:58 a.m., under a specific written contract with the university.

1. August 2012: Thomson Reuters fires data salesman Mark Rosenblum after he raises concerns about the early access with the FBI.
2. April 2013: Rosenblum sues for wrongful termination, and the case surfaces the contract detailing the two-second early release to top clients.
3. July 2013: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opens an inquiry, and Thomson Reuters agrees to release the data to all subscribers at once while regulators review the practice.

The securities markets should be a level playing field for all investors and the early release of market moving survey data undermines fair play in the markets.

Eric Schneiderman, then New York’s attorney general, said in 2013.

A separate 15-millisecond glitch in a related Thomson Reuters feed once produced $28 million in trades in a single flash, according to the trading analytics firm Nanex. A whistleblower complaint later named 16 major banks and hedge funds as recipients of the same University of Michigan data even earlier, in some cases up to an hour before the public release, though the firms were never made public. Thomson Reuters suspended the early access once New York’s attorney general began asking questions and never reinstated it.

Can Anyone Actually Stop This?

No law clearly stops it. The Constitution’s emoluments clauses do not cover this kind of domestic dealing, conflict-of-interest statutes that would normally bar officials from profiting off their own decisions explicitly exempt the president and vice president, and insider-trading rules assume a small, definable group gets the early edge, not potentially thousands of paying subscribers.

Donald Sherman, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the Truth API arrangement wildly unethical because Trump personally stands to benefit from payments for faster access to his own posts. He said it is difficult to determine from public information alone whether the arrangement is illegal.

“I don’t think Congress or any regulatory body ever contemplated that a president or a market mover would engage in this kind of paying-for-access type arrangement,” Sherman said.

Other ethics lawyers were blunter. Dylan Hedler-Gaudette, an expert on federal ethics rules at the watchdog Project on Government Oversight, put it plainly: “It’s odious, selling access to highest bidders on Wall Street. Everything he says has market implications.” Kathleen Clark, a Washington University School of Law professor who studies government ethics, said, “It’s yet more brazen corruption. Trump can line his pockets by selling access.” Clark has noted that federal conflict-of-interest law would normally bar an official from owning a company that profits off decisions the official announces publicly, but the statute explicitly excludes the president and vice president. Every president since the law passed decades ago chose to act as though it applied anyway, divesting stocks or using a blind trust; Trump has refused to do either.

Two of the Senate’s senior Democrats have said so publicly. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, called the plan an egregious scheme to profit off the presidency and enrich Wall Street while doing nothing to help ordinary Americans. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the arrangement would financially benefit the Trump family and “make Wall Street traders rich.” The White House referred questions about both senators’ remarks to Trump Media, which did not respond.

It would not be the first time critics have raised the same question about Trump profiting from his own administration’s decisions. His most recent financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures last year, after his own policies had lifted the value of digital assets he holds.

Wall Street Has Been Trading on His Feed for Years

Charging for a faster feed formalizes something Wall Street has already been doing informally, off Trump’s posts specifically, for the better part of a decade.

Joe Gits runs Social Market Analytics, a Chicago firm that scans social media posts for trading signals and feeds the results to traders. He described how those algorithms hunt for volatility in an interview during Trump’s first term, saying his firm’s software read the president’s posts and decided instantly whether to go long or short.

“These algos are reading the president’s tweet using natural language processing, and our current president’s tweets are pretty easy to read with NLP, and they are either going long or going short,” Gits told the public radio program Marketplace.

The habit even produced hobbyist code. A public repository called trump2cash built a bot that traded stocks off Trump’s tweets automatically, using a live streaming feed, natural language processing and a brokerage connection to fire trades within seconds of a post going out.

Truth API does not invent this behavior. It puts Trump Media in a position to charge for the fastest lane to it, and to keep the proceeds inside a company Trump’s own trust controls.

A Company Still Losing Millions on Its Actual Business

TMTG’s actual media business remains tiny next to its balance sheet.

The company reported a $405.9 million net loss for the first quarter of 2026 on just $871,200 in revenue, according to its first-quarter earnings filed with securities regulators. Most of the loss was non-cash, tied to $368.7 million in unrealized losses on the bitcoin and equity positions the company holds as a treasury strategy.

Run the arithmetic on Truth API and the gap gets stark. One subscriber paying the full $100,000 rate for a year would generate $1.2 million, more than the company’s entire first-quarter revenue combined. Sign up even a handful of trading desks at that price and the new feed could out-earn the media business Trump Media has spent years struggling to grow.

It is the latest pivot for a company that has also bought bitcoin as a treasury asset, discussed merging with a nuclear-fusion startup last December, and briefly considered spinning off Truth Social before dropping the idea in June. The earnings also marked the first quarterly report since Devin Nunes, the former congressman who ran Trump Media, stepped down as chief executive this spring; McGurn, a former Hulu executive, has run the company on an interim basis since.

Investors have not rewarded any of it. TMTG shares have fallen 27% so far this year, closing roughly flat at $9.66 on Friday for a market value of about $2.7 billion. That is still 84% below where the stock traded when it began on the Nasdaq under the ticker DJT in March 2024, after Trump Media went public through a blank-check merger.

Truth API is still set to go live Aug. 1. Trump Media has not named a single client who has agreed to pay for it.