Trump Media’s Truth API trading feed had reached a ‘mid-teens’ number of customers by 24 August 2026, with chief executive Kevin McGurn telling CNBC’s Squawk Box that the figure was ‘climbing’, up from ‘more than ten’ disclosed on the company’s earlier quarterly earnings call. The growth comes as the service faces mounting political and regulatory pressure from both sides of the aisle.
What the Truth API trading feed does and who it is aimed at
Truth API launched on Saturday 2 August 2026, a week after Trump Media filed a press release with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 16 July 2026 describing it as the company’s ‘first data-licensing product.’ The filing said the service would ‘deliver a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths,’ with institutional access available from 1 August 2026.
An application programming interface (API) is a standard mechanism for one computer system to communicate with another. For subscribers to the Truth API trading feed, that means a machine-readable stream of posts from Truth Social’s ‘highest-ranking’ accounts delivered in milliseconds, without the delay of loading a webpage or waiting for a push notification. For high-frequency trading firms running automated systems, even a fraction-of-a-second advantage can matter when a post moves markets.
Trump Media has not published a price for the service. Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that the company discussed charges of up to $100,000 a month, with a discounted rate of around $60,000 a month for firms committing to three years.
President Trump holds the largest account on Truth Social, with 13 million followers. Other prominent accounts include the White House and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., each with roughly 3.9 million followers, and FBI Director Kash Patel with 1.9 million. Trump Media has not published a full list of which accounts qualify for the feed or explained its ranking methodology.
The earliest customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms, CBS News reported, with McGurn confirming the service had generated only a ‘modest amount of revenue’ so far at the August 2026 earnings call. The BBC reported that Trump Media is also exploring opportunities with technology firms, news organisations, and betting markets as potential future customers.
Losses pile up even as Truth API seeks a new revenue stream
The push to monetise Truth Social’s data comes against a backdrop of heavy financial losses. BBC reported that Trump Media posted a loss of $238 million between April and June 2026. A summary of a Trump Media SEC filing published by StockTitan showed the company recorded a net loss of $712.3 million in 2025, largely from changes in the value of digital assets, against annual revenue of just $3.7 million. The company holds a $2.5 billion investment in crypto and other assets as its corporate treasury and offers financial services including exchange-traded funds under its Truth.Fi brand.
McGurn described Truth API as ‘a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.’ Trump owns approximately 41% of Trump Media through a revocable trust, according to a 2025 filing.
Critics push for SEC and CFTC scrutiny
Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote to SEC Chair Paul Atkins describing the service as ‘an outrageous abuse of the President’s office.’ Their letter, summarised by the Senate Banking Committee minority office, described Truth API as providing ‘banks and trading firms the fastest access to posts from the 10 most influential Truth Social accounts.’
The senators cited specific examples, including a June 2026 post about Citigroup stock that they said caused Citigroup to outperform the broader market that day, and a post praising Palantir Technologies that caused Palantir’s stock to jump within minutes, according to Quartz. Their letter also noted that Trump reported making more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from his family’s crypto projects, including his Official Trump memecoin, which critics have cited as evidence of selling access to the president, Al Jazeera reported.
Congressman Ritchie Torres separately wrote to the SEC requesting an evaluation of whether Truth API implicates federal securities laws, market-manipulation protections, and broker-dealer obligations, and called for coordination with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Office of Government Ethics, according to his official statement.
Trump Media’s spokesperson Shannon Devine rejected the insider-trading characterisation, 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.’
Not everyone is convinced the feed is worth buying regardless of its legality. Vuk Vuković, a founding partner of the hedge fund Oraclum Capital, wrote on X that his team found no reliable signal when comparing Trump’s posts with market moves, saying ‘he’s selling you noise.’ Morgan Stanley analysts said last month that market-moving reactions to Truth Social posts were occurring less frequently.
With the SEC yet to respond publicly to the Warren-Schiff letter and the Torres request, and McGurn signalling the customer base is still growing, whether regulators decide to act before Truth API’s revenue becomes material to Trump Media’s finances is the question the next earnings call will sharpen.