Trading Firms Are Paying Up to $100,000 a Month to See Trump's Posts a Few Milliseconds Early

Trump Media & Technology Group is selling high-frequency trading firms a data feed that delivers posts from top Truth Social accounts faster than the public site does, at prices running from $60,000 to $100,000 a month. Chief Executive Kevin McGurn said more than 10 customers have signed contracts for the product, which the company calls the Truth API.

The customers are the ones who make the arrangement notable. High-frequency firms trade on latency measured in thousandths of a second, and the single most reliably market-moving publisher on Truth Social is the president of the United States, who owns roughly 41% of the company selling the feed — a stake worth about $1 billion. The service is not restricted to his account, but that is what makes it worth six figures a month.

"Milliseconds make a difference" for firms operating at that speed, said Richard Painter, a securities law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as chief ethics counsel in the George W. Bush White House. He said the structure raises questions under insider-trading law, because the value being sold is early sight of statements that move prices.

Jessica Tillipman of George Washington University Law School framed the problem in terms of incentives rather than legality: "The structure gives the president a personal financial interest in the market impact of his own official statements."

Sen. Mark Warner has introduced legislation that would bar social media companies from selling preferential access to the accounts of government employees when those accounts carry market-moving information. Trump Media has called the criticism misguided, arguing the API delivers nothing that is not already public and delivers it only slightly faster than anyone can read it on the site.

The company is also in discussions with cloud computing firms, artificial intelligence companies and news organizations about the feed, and McGurn said Trump Media eventually intends to market a version to retail investors. "We're encouraged by the early demand for Truth API," he said, describing it as a future "meaningful, durable contributor" to revenue.

It would be starting from a small base. Trump Media reported second-quarter revenue of $1.67 million, up 89% from a year earlier, against losses of $238 million — a tenfold increase driven largely by the declining value of the company's cryptocurrency holdings. DJT shares fell nearly 6% on Tuesday and are down 49% over the past year, a stretch in which the S&P 500 gained 21%. The company has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2021, which is the commercial context for selling a millisecond.