‘This is insider trading by definition’: Trump sells $100,000 monthly subscription service to Wall Street to further monetize the presidency
Joshua Hong
Tue, August 4, 2026 at 9:37 PM GMT+5:30
6 min read
Donald Trump has created a way for Wall Street to pay to win. Trump Media & Technology Group’s premium data product released its new subscription service for earlier access to Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month. According to reports, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, gaining access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the general public
“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.”
