Trump Sells Early Access to His Own Market-Moving Words for $100K
Traders keep beating Trump's announcements to the market and now his company sells Wall Street a head start on his posts, a Congressman has opened an investigation.
Donald Trump — President of the United States (federal)
under investigation Preponderance of reporting — not a findingDonald Trump runs the country and, it turns out, a side business selling advance notice of what he's about to say about it. Trump Media & Technology Group now charges Wall Street firms $100,000 a month for a data feed that gets them Truth Social posts milliseconds before everyone else [S2]. Five firms have already signed up [S2]. Meanwhile, a BBC data analysis found traders repeatedly beating Trump's biggest announcements to the market by minutes, sometimes close to an hour [S1].
You're thinking, Rob, markets move on rumor all the time, this is just people being good at their jobs. Sometimes. Not forty-seven minutes early on oil futures, not twice in two weeks, not when the same pattern shows up on prediction markets too.
The Case Against Donald Trump
The BBC matched trade volume data against Trump's biggest market-moving statements and found "a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public" [S1]. On 9 March, oil bets surged 47 minutes before a reporter even posted about Trump's CBS interview saying the Iran war was "very complete" [S1], and the traders who placed those bets "will have made millions of dollars" [S1]. On 9 April 2025, ahead of the tariff pause announcement, "some traders bet over $2m on the stock market increasing that day" for a possible profit of "almost $20m" [S1].
On the prediction markets:
- An account called Burdensome-Mix bet $32,500 on Nicolás Maduro being ousted by the end of January 2026, and won $436,000 when US special forces seized him the next day [S1].
- Six Polymarket accounts created in February bet on a US strike on Iran by 28 February and split $1.2 million when it happened [S1].
Then there's Truth API itself. Trump owns roughly 41% of TMTG's shares, so he profits directly from the new subscription revenue, which would run about $500,000 a month, or $6 million a year, at just five subscribers [S2]. That's pocket change next to the rest of it. His 2025 financial disclosure shows his businesses made more than $2 billion in personal income, nearly quadruple 2024, including $1.4 billion from crypto alone, $635 million in $TRUMP meme coin royalties, and over $500 million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture his sons run [S2]. He also signed stablecoin legislation months after World Liberty launched its own [S2].
Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, opened an official investigation into the "scheme" on July 31, writing that Trump is "using [the presidential office] to enrich in spectacular fashion himself, his family, and corporate cronies" while "destroying the integrity of financial markets" [S2]. The White House also sent staff an internal email warning them not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets [S1].
PUBLIC OPINION
Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern, told Fortune bluntly, "This is insider trading by definition" [S2]. Richard Painter, a former White House chief ethics counsel, has argued the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving news before it's public, with Truth Social acting as a paid "tipper" [S2]. Renée Jones, a Boston College law professor and former senior SEC official, told Fortune, "Material nonpublic information belongs to the U.S. government or to the American people, not to Truth Social or President Trump" [S2].
BULLSHIT DEFENSE
Shannon Devine, a TMTG spokeswoman, told 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" [S2]. White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the BBC that "any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting" [S1].
Here's the hole in that. Nobody's claiming the posts stay secret forever. The complaint is that paying customers get them before you do, from a feed sold by a company the president owns a chunk of. "Publicly available eventually" and "publicly available to everyone at the same moment" are not the same sentence, and Devine is betting you won't notice the difference. The White House, for its part, didn't respond to the BBC's actual questions about the trading data at all [S1], and TMTG didn't respond to Fortune either [S2]. That's not a defense. That's a dodge dressed up as one.
Nobody's been charged. Nobody's been fined. The law on the books since 2012 has never put a single official in front of a jury for this, and Oudin's right that it probably never will. That doesn't make the pattern innocent, it just makes it well-insulated.
P.S. Watch what happens the first time Truth API's "highest ranking Truth accounts" post something that moves a market before the public sees it. That's the test case Painter's actually worried about, and Raskin's subpoena is fishing for the records that would prove it happened. ~ Rob
Sources — 2 articles
Reported independently by 7 separate outlets. No single newsroom getting it wrong would put it here. Of those, 2 could be downloaded and read, and only those are cited below — the rest would not serve us the article. Every fact here was checked against text we actually hold.