Trump’s Post on Selling Milliseconds to Wall Street: A Breakdown of Truth Social’s Parent Company’s “Influence Business Playbook”

Original author: Claude, Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Briefing: Truth Social’s parent company Trump Media (DJT) announced that starting August 1 it will sell to hedge funds millisecond-level real-time data based on Trump posts. This is not an isolated incident. From SPAC listing to a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury, to a $6 billion nuclear fusion merger, and now to today’s data licensing—this company, with quarterly revenue of less than $1 million, has been doing the same thing for the past two years: systematically productizing Trump’s influence. On the same day, CNN revealed that after Trump bought shares in 21 companies, he publicly praised those companies on Truth Social.

Truth Social has finally put a price tag on its most valuable asset.

According to reports by Fast Company and several other media outlets on July 16, Truth Social’s parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (Nasdaq: DJT, hereafter Trump Media) announced the launch of Truth API, providing institutional clients with millisecond-level real-time data pushes for posts from the top 10 highest-impact accounts on Truth Social, going live on August 1.

Interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in a statement, “The market has already been moving because of Truth Social posts,” and that Truth API is part of the company’s strategy to monetize proprietary assets “through high-margin, recurring revenue streams.” The company said it has already signed up some customers ahead of launch, but pricing has not been disclosed.

On its own, this is just a social media platform opening an enterprise-level API—X and Reddit have done similar things. But viewed within Trump Media’s monetization path over the past two years, Truth API marks this company completing the loop from “selling stock” to “selling influence itself.”

From SPAC backdoor listing to selling an API: a full walkthrough of the two-year monetization path

Trump Media’s monetization logic has never been the traditional media-company model of ads plus subscriptions. In 2026 Q1, the company’s revenue was only $871.2k—one quarter’s income still not enough for a single senior engineer’s annual salary in Silicon Valley. In the same period, net losses totaled $405.9 million, including $368.7 million from unrealized losses on digital assets and equity securities.

What the company has truly been selling is the influence and attention of Trump himself. The monetization has gone through several iterations:

In March 2024, Trump Media entered Nasdaq via SPAC backdoor listing, directly converting Trump’s political influence into equity value—DJT briefly surged above $40. This was the most crude approach, essentially harvesting retail sentiment using meme stock logic.

In January 2025, the company launched its fintech brand Truth.Fi, allocating an initial $250 million to Bitcoin and ETF products. That same year, it partnered with Crypto.com to launch an “America First” themed ETF and filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF. By May 2025, Trump Media announced that it would raise more than $2.3 billion through additional share issuance and convertible notes to establish a Bitcoin treasury. The logic behind this round was: since DJT stock itself behaves like a crypto asset, why not bet the balance sheet directly on Bitcoin, using BTC price moves to leverage the company’s valuation.

As of 2026 Q1, Trump Media held 9,542 BTC (worth about $767 million, with an average price of $118,529) and 756 million CRO (worth about $54 million). Total assets jumped from $759 million a year earlier to $2.2 billion. The cost was also clear: in Q1, Bitcoin fell 22%, directly contributing more than $400 million in unrealized losses.

In December 2025, Trump Media announced it would merge with nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies in an all-stock transaction, valuing the combined entity at more than $6 billion. It didn’t matter that a social media business wasn’t big—using DJT stock as currency to acquire real assets was the point. But by June 2026, the company abandoned the plan to split Truth Social into a standalone company.

Now it’s July 2026 and the Truth API. The difference from all the earlier moves is that for the first time, Trump Media made the fact that “Trump’s posts can move markets” into a product that can be directly purchased. No need for stock price volatility, no need for Bitcoin up or down—just sell the distribution rights to the content itself.

“Presidential press briefing room” becomes a paid data source

Truth API’s special nature lies here: there are many social platforms selling data interfaces, but other platforms’ top users are not the President of the United States.

Ethics lawyer Virginia Canter, speaking to CNBC, called it “a massive conflict of interest.” She said the president has “an obligation to publicly communicate information to the American people, and now he is disseminating information through a private channel—of which he himself is one of the largest shareholders.”

Trump’s Truth Social posts have repeatedly moved markets directly. His comments about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz affected oil prices; in spring 2025, his tariff-related posts caused a stock market crash, and later posts about withdrawing part of the tariffs drove the market higher again.

McGurn told Axios that previously, some companies spent months scraping Truth Social data without authorization, repeatedly violating terms of service. An official API would legitimize and productize such demand. He also revealed that Trump Media is discussing with AI companies licensing Truth Social data for large language model training.

Trump Media is building an entire data-licensing ecosystem centered on Trump’s content.

CNN exposed on the same day: praising the same company days after buying its stock

The timing of the Truth API announcement is especially intriguing. On the same day (July 16), CNN published the results of an investigation: within days after Trump bought shares in 21 companies, he posted praises for those companies on Truth Social, with some posts also announcing government actions that could benefit those companies.

CNN used AI tools to match Trump’s Truth Social post database against the full list of stock transactions disclosed in his annual financial filings. It found that within one week, Trump made at least 44 stock purchase transactions involving 21 companies, and then published posts praising those companies.

Specific cases include: in early April 2025, Trump’s account bought NVIDIA shares in the range of $200k to $500k; a few days later, he celebrated NVIDIA’s expansion in the United States on Truth Social and promised that “all necessary licenses will be expedited.” Last year he invested at least $4 million in Tesla, including purchases made before posting a video of himself and Musk admiring Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn.

The White House responded that Trump’s assets are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions, and that Trump and his family have “no control” over which stocks are bought and sold.

The two things happening on the same day might just be a coincidence. But taken together: on one side, the president’s posts are effectively moving markets; on the other, the president’s company has officially turned the “first look rights” to those posts into a paid product.

Quarterly revenue under $1 million—what supports a $2.4 billion market cap?

As of July 13, DJT’s share price was $8.56, with a market cap of about $2.37 billion. Over the past year, the share price has fallen by more than 56%, nearly 80% compared with the $40-plus level before Trump took office.

But Trump Media’s valuation has never been supported by revenue. In Q1, the company had total assets of $2.2 billion, with financial assets of about $2.1 billion. The narrative of a “Trump concept holding company” is built from the Bitcoin treasury, the Truth.Fi financial product line, the expected TAE fusion merger, and now the expected Truth API data-licensing revenue.

How much revenue Truth API can generate is still unknown. The company hasn’t published pricing, nor disclosed how many customers have signed and at what scale. A reference point is: X’s enterprise API base plan costs $42k per month; before its IPO, Reddit also made data licensing one of the core parts of its revenue narrative. But X has a global user base, Reddit has a massive amount of UGC content, while the core asset of Truth Social is highly concentrated in one person. That’s an advantage (scarcity) and also a risk (single-point dependence).

Trump Media’s monetization path over the past two years can be summarized in four steps: use SPAC to turn influence into equity value; use a Bitcoin treasury to expand the balance sheet; widen the holding-company narrative with the TAE merger; and turn information advantage itself into a product with Truth API. Each step converts the fact that “one of Trump’s posts can move markets” into more direct, more measurable income.

Across past presidents, conflicts of interest are typically avoided by selling personal stocks, divesting business interests, or placing assets into blind trusts. Trump has refused to take these measures. For market watchers, the question is no longer “can Truth Social make money”—but whether the act of putting a sitting president’s information advantage, priced explicitly for Wall Street, has any regulatory and ethical boundaries at all.