Trump Media launches paid data service as Wall Street tracks Trump’s posts

The company behind social-media network Truth Social is launching a service that will give paying customers interested in market-moving information “licensed, real-time access” to posts from President Donald Trump and other top accounts, the company said Thursday.

Trump’s family is the largest shareholder Trump Media & Technology Group, the public company that operates Truth Social. The president’s @realDonaldTrump account is the largest account on Truth Social, according to a 2025 survey by SEO.ai. His account had 12.9 million followers on Thursday morning. Trump regularly posts official communications first on Truth Social, making his account a must-follow for Wall Street firms and news organizations that track the presidency.

Trump Media didn’t mention the president in its press release announcing the service, known as an API, or Application Programming Interface. But it nodded to potential interest by Wall Street firms. “Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, Trump Media’s interim chief executive officer, said in the release.

The White House didn’t respond to an email about the announcement but forwarded CNBC’s message to the Trump Organization, which declined to comment.

Trump Media didn’t respond to an email with follow-up questions.

The API will launch Aug. 1 and already has signed up some institutional customers, Trump Media’s release said.

“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” said Virginia Canter, an ethics attorney with Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit organization that has been critical of the Trump administration. The president “has an obligation to the American people to convey information to them publicly, and he’s now funneling it through a private channel in which he has a private interest as one of its largest shareholders.” 

Truth Social has “become the de facto presidential press room,” Canter said.

The social network has other large users besides the president, but few who can provide consistent market-moving information. Many are conservative personalities who are close to the president.

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has 7.4 million followers, while Eric Trump has 3.3 million. Devin Nunes, who left Congress to run Trump Media but has since left the company, has 4.5 million followers. Former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino has 3.5 million.

Trump Media is following a path blazed by other social networks, which also provide APIs to paying customers. Hedge funds and other Wall Street firms use low-latency feeds to gain an edge on market-moving information posted on social networks. They can use access to post archives to create algorithms that respond to sentiment and emerging trends.

But none of those other social networks are the primary outlet for official posts by the president of the U.S. Trump regularly posts updates on his decisions about the war with Iran and tariffs on Truth Social, among other issues. 

The president shares a continuous stream of posts on Truth Social, where he can post a dozen times a day or more. Many posts are reshares of flattering memes by his supporters. Others are more consequential.

On Monday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would reinstate a naval blockade against Iran and would impose a 20% fee on commercial traffic. On Wednesday, Trump cancelled the plan to impose a fee. In another post this week, he reversed a brief halt on traffic stops by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers after the fatal shootings of two people.

None of those posts was shared on Trump’s verified X account, where he has 112 million followers.

Truth Social was launched in 2021 in response to decisions by X and Facebook to ban Trump’s account in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. He has since been reinstated to both.

Trump Media went public through a blank-check merger and has traded on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker DJT since March 26, 2024. Its shares are down 84% since then through Thursday morning, according to FactSet data.

Roughly 114 million shares, now amounting to 42% of Trump Media, were issued to Trump, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. On winning the presidency, he transferred those shares to a revocable trust in the name of his son Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Media’s stock sales have made it cash rich, though it has had difficulty turning a profit in its core business. The company purchased bitcoin in an effort to bet on crypto, only to suffer financially when prices fell. Trump Media reported a $406 million net loss in the first quarter of 2026, according to SEC filings.

In December, Trump Media announced it would merge with a nuclear-fusion company, and it considered spinning off the social media business into a separate company. In June, it ended the efforts to spin off Truth Social.