Trump Media lost $238m on $1.7m of revenue, and its paid feed of the President's posts is now in court

Trump Media and Technology Group reported a net loss of $238 million for the second quarter of 2026 on revenue of $1.7 million, a ratio of roughly 140 to one. Revenue was split between $1.43 million of advertising and $179,500 of subscriptions, and was up 89 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier. Across the first half of 2026 the company lost $644 million on revenue of $2.5 million. Al Jazeera reported the shares fell 8 per cent on the result.

The composition of the loss matters more than its size. Al Jazeera reported that $190.4 million of it was unrealised losses on digital assets and equity securities, with $11.7 million of accreted interest and $8.1 million of stock based compensation. That is a mark to market movement rather than a cash operating shortfall, and it means the company's reported losses will keep moving with asset prices regardless of what the social network does.

What the social network does is not encouraging either. Al Jazeera, citing tracking data reported by The New York Times, said visitors to Truth Social in July 2026 were down by more than a third against July 2025. The ABC, citing the Associated Press, reported that Trump Media shares have fallen by 75 per cent since the President returned to office in 2025. The Intercept reported that his stake, worth $4 billion in January 2025 when it stood at 52.1 per cent of the company, had fallen to around $1 billion.

Against that backdrop the company launched a product called the Truth API on 1 August 2026, which delivers posts from the platform's most followed accounts to paying customers before they appear publicly. Euronews reported the feed covers the ten most followed accounts, including the President, the White House, Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The price is $60,000 to $100,000 a month.

The sources disagree on uptake, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than resolving. Al Jazeera reported that ten companies had signed up. The ABC, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported at least five trading firms. Euronews reported company executives saying more than ten customers had signed up, mostly high frequency trading firms. None of the three reports names the subscribers, and the company has not published a list.

On 12 August 2026 The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, case number 26-cv-6867. The defendants are the President, his executive assistant Natalie Harp, White House deputy chief of staff Daniel Scavino, the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office. The plaintiffs plead a First Amendment claim, arguing that selling priority access to official presidential statements denies equal access, and a Fifth Amendment claim over the conditions attached to that access. Seth Stern, the foundation's chief of advocacy, said a president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls was so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard even to fathom a few years ago. Nikhel Sus, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said all Americans are entitled to timely access to their president's public statements, not just those willing to pay the president's company $100,000 a month. Ben Muessig, editor in chief of The Intercept, said the President was trying to enrich himself by privatising government information he has no right to sell. The White House and Trump Media have not been reported as having filed a response.

Separately, researchers at Queensland University of Technology examined market activity around the President's Truth Social posts over a 73 day window and found 15 instances in which oil markets appeared to move before he posted on the topic. Stephen Harrington, an associate professor at QUT, told the ABC it looked extremely suspicious, and that it seemed trades were being placed by someone with inside information about what the President was about to say in the hour or two before he posted. Dewan Rahman of the University of Queensland Business School drew the distinction that matters legally: if you are paying for speed rather than information, that is fine, and the insider trading concern arises when you have an information advantage. The ABC report does not give the dates of the window the researchers examined, so it is not possible from that account to say whether the activity described predates the Truth API.

Several things are unresolved. It is not known whether any securities regulator has opened an inquiry into the API or into the trading patterns QUT identified. It is not known which firms are paying, on what latency, or whether the contracts contain any restriction on trading. The suit was filed five days ago and no ruling has issued. And because most of the reported loss is an unrealised writedown, the company's next quarterly figure will say more about asset prices than about whether anyone is advertising on Truth Social.