Trump Media: HFTs Paying $60K-$100K/Month for Early Truth Social Posts

Trump Media told analysts on its first-ever earnings call that more than 10 customers, mostly high-frequency trading firms, have signed up for its new Truth API, paying between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for millisecond-early access to posts from top Truth Social accounts. For traders, the pitch is simple: get the president’s market-moving posts a beat before everyone else.

What Truth API actually sells

Trump Media (DJT) said the feed delivers machine-readable posts from the platform’s most-followed accounts in milliseconds, giving subscribers a fractional speed edge over the public feed. The company said Truth API delivers machine-readable feeds of posts from top Truth Social accounts in milliseconds, allowing customers to receive published posts fractionally faster than other users.

In its first-ever earnings call with analysts Monday evening, Trump Media said it has signed more than 10 customer agreements, mostly with high-frequency trading companies, willing to pay between $60,000 and $100,000 a month to gain access to the Truth Social data feed.

Why HFTs will pay for milliseconds

Trump often uses Truth Social to announce policy shifts, sometimes ahead of his own administration. On April 9, 2025, Wall Street’s main indexes turned sharply higher after Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would pause many of his new tariffs for 90 days.

That kind of headline risk is exactly what algo desks live for. Access to the Truth API would be essential for high-frequency trading firms as a speed advantage of just a few milliseconds can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of gains on big trades, according to sources.

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A new revenue line as the platform shrinks

DJT needs the money. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn called it a potential meaningful revenue source as the company posted a $238 million quarterly loss.

Meanwhile, the underlying platform is losing users. In July, Truth Social attracted just 261,300 daily active users, down 40% year over year, according to data shared with CNN by research firm Similarweb. X averaged 123.5 million daily active users in July, or nearly 500 times more than Truth Social.

McGurn also announced that the company is in active conversations to grant Truth API access to news organizations and AI companies, including hyperscalers that provide huge amounts of computing powered by massive data centers and large language models.

Political and regulatory pushback

The service is drawing fire from Democrats who argue it could tilt markets. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff urged federal regulators to investigate whether Trump Media’s plan to give Wall Street firms access to Trump’s social media posts is legal, describing it as a shocking abuse of the office of the President and calling for the SEC to determine if the arrangement violates federal securities law.

Trump Media Interim CEO Kevin McGurn defended the service during the call, saying the criticism is misinformed and that providing licensed real-time public data through commercial APIs is a well-established business practice across technology, financial information and media.

Options market and stocks to watch

DJT: Watch for flow reactions to any new Truth API customer disclosures, AI hyperscaler deals, or SEC inquiry headlines. This is now a data-licensing story stacked on top of a shrinking social platform.

SPY and QQQ: Watch for intraday whipsaws around Trump posts on tariffs, Fed commentary, or geopolitics, the exact catalysts HFT clients are paying to front-run at the millisecond level.

TSLA and other single-name political sensitivities: Watch for outsized moves in names Trump mentions directly, since latency-advantaged desks can lean on those posts faster than retail.

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