‘This is insider trading by definition’: Trump presents $100,000 per 30 days subscription to Wall Street

“I’ll be blunt,” Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business, told Fortune. “This is insider trading by definition.”

Because Trump owns roughly 41% of the company’s shares, he stands to directly profit from the new recurring revenue stream. At five subscribers alone, the service would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually.

That figure is modest by the standards Trump has set since returning to the White House. His 2025 financial disclosure showed his businesses generated more than $2 billion in personal income last year—nearly quadruple his 2024 total—with the bulk flowing from ventures that sit directly at the intersection of his office and his balance sheet. He earned roughly $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency alone, including $635 million in royalties from his $TRUMP meme coin and more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture run by his sons. 

Notably, Trump signed legislation promoting stablecoins just months after World Liberty launched its own—a policy-to-profit pipeline structurally similar to what Truth API now does with his social media posts. He has also collected millions from Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers, and watches, and Melania Trump secured a reported $28 million deal with Jeff Bezos for a documentary. Truth API is the latest mechanism in an established playbook.

Trump’s media venture has struggled to build a profitable social media business despite its lofty valuation. Truth Social has reported significant operating losses since going public. According to the company’s earnings report for Q1 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group netted a roughly $405 million loss and raised less than $900,000 in sales. 

Clementi argues the arrangement allows Trump to monetize information he possesses because of his office.

“He’s going to monetize the role of the office of the president of the United States,” he said. “The undisputable fact is that somebody is going to earn some more money than before, and that’s the president of the United States.”

Not everyone agrees the arrangement meets the legal bar for insider trading. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, has pushed back on the characterization, telling Quartz that Truth API “offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data” and that critics “must have invented a new theory of ‘insider trading’ based on publicly available information”. 

Classic insider trading law hinges on trading on secret, material information in breach of a fiduciary duty, and Truth Social posts are, by design, meant to become public within moments—raising real doctrinal uncertainty about whether faster access alone qualifies. But other legal experts argue the greater risk lies ahead. Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics counsel, has argued that the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving news—on tariffs, military action, or other policy decisions—before it’s public, with Truth Social effectively acting as a paid “tipper” on the president’s behalf. 

Renée Jones, a Boston College law professor and former senior SEC official, agreed, telling Fortune that ““Material nonpublic information belongs to the U.S. government or to the American people, not to Truth Social or President Trump.” 

This fits a now well-documented pattern. According to Trump’s 927-page annual financial disclosure report, the president earned over $1 billion from his cryptocurrency ventures and other businesses, part of a broader $2 billion haul in 2025 alone. Truth API represents a new frontier; monetizing not a product or a brand, but real-time access to presidential speech.

Before Truth API, Wall Street trading firms relied on manually scraping the social media platform for information before making trades. Now, instead of racing to scrape the site, firms can purchase a licensed, low-latency data feed directly from Trump’s hand.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” interim CEO of TMTG Kevin McGurn said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.”

Trump Media & Technology Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Financial markets have long rewarded investors who receive information fractions of a second faster than competitors. Truth API applies that to presidential communications. The company says subscribers receive a direct machine-readable feed from “the highest ranking Truth accounts,” allowing the trading systems to ingest the posts instantly. Trump’s Truth Social account, with 13 million followers, is likely among the accounts available through Truth API.

For firms that spend millions of dollars chasing advantages in the race to execute trades, those milliseconds can be worth far more than the six-figure subscription price. The release also states the system “is designed for organizations most impacted by the cost of a delay in information,” with manual data collection being too slow for “high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms.”

Truth Social’s terms of service lists “systematically” compiling data as prohibited activity on its site.

The outcry against insider trading also comes from within Washington. Representative Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, launched an official investigation into the “scheme” on July 31st. According to the investigation letter addressed to McGurn, Rep. Raskin accused Trump of failing “to ‘take Care’ that laws are enforced and to advance the public interest.”

“President Trump is, once again, using it to enrich in spectacular fashion himself, his family, and corporate cronies,” Rep. Raskin wrote, “while also destroying the integrity of financial markets in the process.”

The letter also demanded records from Truth Social, under the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee. Among the demands outlined in the letter include records of the Wall Street firms who have subscribed, and records of the ‘highest‑ranking Truth Social accounts’ that will be available through the Truth API.

The office of Representative and Ranking Member Raskin declined a further request for comment.

Clementi believes the introduction of blatant insider trading will negatively impact the financial market’s movement. He says the brazen subscription service would de-influence many traders from making trades in the future.

“If people know, if market participants know, that there are certain individuals in the market that are privy to information regularly because of their connections, and we are not,” he told Fortune, “that is going to make us refrain from trading because we are afraid that every time we trade on the other side of the trade, there is someone that knows more about the stock than us.”

He is also concerned about the difficulty of regulating insider trading. Clementi says “it’s well known that insider trading is one of the hardest crimes to prosecute,” and it’s due to that difficulty that insider trading is not prosecuted often. But this doesn’t mean the market will not correct itself, however, according to Clementi. The professor says it’s in the market’s best interest to shut down insider trading before it begins, to maintain legitimacy and longevity.

“The market is going to implode,” he told Fortune. “So it’s going to be in the interest of those platforms to make sure that people with insider trading do not trade.”