Donald Trump has created a way for Wall Street to pay for faster access to information. Trump Media & Technology Group’s premium data product has launched a subscription service that offers earlier access to Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month. According to reports, five Wall Street firms have already signed up, giving them access to 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 benefit directly from the new recurring revenue stream. At five subscribers, the service would generate about $500,000 a month, or $6 million a year.

That amount is small 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 four times his 2024 total, with much of that coming from ventures that sit at the intersection of his office and his balance sheet. He earned about $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.

Trump also signed legislation promoting stablecoins just months after World Liberty launched its own, a policy-to-profit pipeline that is structurally similar to what Truth API now does with his social media posts. He has also taken in millions from Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and watches, and Melania Trump reportedly secured a $28 million deal with Jeff Bezos for a documentary. Truth API is the latest mechanism in that playbook.

Trump’s media venture has struggled to build a profitable social media business despite its high valuation. Truth Social has reported significant operating losses since going public. According to the company’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group posted a loss of about $405 million and generated less than $900,000 in sales.

Clementi said the arrangement allows Trump to monetize information he has 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 that the arrangement meets the legal standard for insider trading. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, told Quartz that Truth API “offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data” and said critics “must have invented a new theory of ‘insider trading’ based on publicly available information.”

Classic insider-trading law generally turns on trading on secret, material information in breach of a fiduciary duty. Truth Social posts, by design, are meant to become public within moments, which raises doctrinal questions about whether faster access alone is enough.

Still, some legal experts argue the greater risk could come later. Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics counsel, has said the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving information — such as tariffs, military action or other policy decisions — before it is public, with Truth Social effectively serving as a paid “tipper” on the president’s behalf. During his first term, Trump’s tweets on trade policy, tariffs and individual companies were documented to move markets within minutes, a pattern that underscored the financial value of being first to react to his statements.

Renée Jones, a Boston College law professor and former senior SEC official, agreed. “Material nonpublic information belongs to the U.S. government or to the American people, not to Truth Social or President Trump,” she told Fortune.

The development fits a now well-documented pattern. According to Trump’s 927-page annual financial disclosure report, the president earned more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency ventures and other businesses, part of a broader $2 billion haul in 2025 alone. Truth API represents a new frontier: monetizing not a product or a brand, but real-time access to presidential speech.

Before Truth API, Wall Street trading firms reportedly relied on manually scraping the social media platform for information before making trades. Now, instead of racing to scrape the site, firms can buy a licensed, low-latency data feed directly from Trump’s company.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” interim CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group Kevin McGurn said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.”

Trump Media & Technology Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Financial markets have long rewarded investors who receive information fractions of a second faster than competitors. Exchanges and financial data providers already sell tiered access to market data, and firms routinely pay premiums for direct feeds and co-location services that shave microseconds off transmission times. Truth API applies that same dynamic to presidential communications. The company says subscribers receive a direct machine-readable feed from “the highest ranking Truth accounts,” allowing trading systems to ingest posts instantly. Trump’s Truth Social account, which has 13 million followers, is likely among the accounts available through Truth API.

For firms that spend millions of dollars chasing advantages in the race to execute trades, those milliseconds can be worth far more than the six-figure subscription price. The release also says the system “is designed for organizations most impacted by the cost of a delay in information,” and that manual data collection is too slow for “high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms.”

Truth Social’s terms of service also lists “systematically” compiling data as prohibited activity on its site.

The backlash has come from Washington as well. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, launched an official investigation into the “scheme” on July 31. In the investigation letter addressed to McGurn, Raskin accused Trump of failing “to ‘take Care’ that laws are enforced and to advance the public interest.”

“President Trump is, once again, using [the presidential office] to enrich in spectacular fashion himself, his family, and corporate cronies,” Raskin wrote, “while also destroying the integrity of financial markets in the process.”

The letter also requested records from Truth Social, which falls under the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee. Among the materials sought are records of the Wall Street firms that have subscribed and records of the “highest‑ranking Truth Social accounts” that will be available through Truth API. Congressional investigations of this type typically proceed through document production, staff review and potential public hearings, though the timeline and scope depend on committee leadership and cooperation from the parties involved.

The office of Representative and Ranking Member Raskin declined a further request for comment.

Clementi said the service could affect market behavior by discouraging some traders from participating. “If people know, if market participants know, that there are certain individuals in the market that are privy to information regularly because of their connections, and we are not,” he told Fortune, “that is going to make us refrain from trading because we are afraid that every time we trade on the other side of the trade, there is someone that knows more about the stock than us.”

He also noted how difficult insider-trading cases are to prosecute. “It’s well known that insider trading is one of the hardest crimes to prosecute,” Clementi said, adding that this is one reason it is not often prosecuted. He argued that the market has an interest in stopping insider trading before it starts to preserve legitimacy and longevity.

“The market is going to implode,” he told Fortune. “So it’s going to be in the interest of those platforms to make sure that people with insider trading do not trade.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com