What the Company Says, in Its Own SEC Filing
DOCUMENTED. Trump Media filed the transcript of interim chief executive Kevin McGurn's Aug. 24 CNBC interview with the SEC as Exhibit 99.1 to a Form 8-K (accession 0001437749-26-029174). Four statements in it matter here. First: "We don't disclose our customers; we let them go out there in the market and talk about it. But we're getting into the mid-teens now, and we're climbing." Second: "We give a 50-millisecond advantage in that post, but that's the internet delivery. All posts go out in real time." Third: "We just signed one of the largest financial data and information distributors at the end of last week." Fourth, on plans: the company wants to license the feed to retail trading platforms, AI language models and prediction markets as well. View Dashboard →
The third statement changes the question. A distributor resells to its own clients. Those clients would not be Trump Media's customers on any list the company keeps, and they would not appear in any count it gives. The Old Goat found no public announcement naming the distributor.
DOCUMENTED. The Financial Times profile that Trump Media also filed (Exhibit 99.1 to accession 0001437749-26-026265) quotes McGurn: "when the user presses post, it's public information," and says about 10 groups had signed at $60,000 to $100,000 a month, mostly high-frequency traders. The two exhibits are the company's own filings of what was said, not independent confirmation that the claims are true.
What the Law Would Have to Show
INFERENCE, framed as questions for lawyers. The insider-trading theory critics have raised rests on five elements. The information must be material. It must be nonpublic. Someone must owe a duty to keep it confidential or not to trade on it. A tipper must get a personal benefit if a tippee trades (Dirks v. SEC, 1983; Salman v. United States, 2016). Someone must trade. The misappropriation theory (United States v. O'Hagan, 1997) covers trading on confidential information in breach of a duty to its source. For executive-branch officials, the STOCK Act of 2012 states that a duty of trust exists for nonpublic information obtained through the position. Whether that text reaches the President personally is a question for counsel; the Old Goat found no court ruling on it. For commodity trading, the Commodity Exchange Act's Section 4c(a)(4) covers federal employees using nonpublic government information, the rule the Old Goat covered in The Eddie Murphy Rule.
The element in dispute is "nonpublic." McGurn's position is that a post is public the moment it is pressed. The plaintiffs and 53 former federal prosecutors and agents, per CBS News, say a paid head start makes the information nonpublic to the people who did not pay. No court has ruled on that. The company's own number is 50 milliseconds. Whether 50 milliseconds is enough to be "nonpublic" is the legal question the lawsuits are built on.
Who Could Make the Company Name Its Customers
INFERENCE. Each route below exists in law. None has been publicly shown to be in use.
- The SEC. It can issue investigative subpoenas under Section 21 of the Exchange Act and can see trade-level data. Warren and Schiff asked for an investigation on July 28. No public response was found.
- A congressional majority. Committee subpoenas need a chairman or a majority vote. A minority-party letter, such as the one Representative Raskin reportedly sent on July 30 (single-sourced, letter not read), asks but cannot compel. The midterms are Nov. 3.
- The federal courts. Trump Media is not a defendant in The Intercept Media v. Trump (S.D.N.Y. 1:26-cv-06867). A non-party can be served with a Rule 45 subpoena for documents, and the judge decides whether the customer list is relevant. Preliminary-injunction motions often run without discovery.
- State attorneys general. New York's Martin Act and Executive Law 63(12) give its attorney general broad subpoena power over securities conduct. Nothing public shows it has acted.
- A shareholder. Trump Media is incorporated in Florida (10-Q cover). Florida's Business Corporation Act, Section 607.1602, gives shareholders inspection rights over certain records on a written demand. Whether customer contracts fall inside it, and any ownership threshold, are questions for counsel.
- The company's own filings. Accounting rule ASC 280 requires a company to disclose revenue from any single customer at 10 percent or more of total revenue. It does not require a name. The Old Goat's check of the 10-Q shows the company already follows that pattern: "One advertising platform accounted for 49.9 percent" of six-month revenue, unnamed. A name would be required if a buyer were a related person, such as a director, officer, 5 percent holder or family member, under Regulation S-K Item 404 for dealings above $120,000. The Old Goat has not checked the proxy statement for that.
- Not the White House by FOIA. The Freedom of Information Act covers federal agencies. It does not cover the President's immediate office or a private company. It can reach agency records, such as the SEC's correspondence about the feed, subject to exemptions that protect open investigations.
DOCUMENTED. A search of Trump Media's EDGAR filings from July 1 to Oct. 15 found no Form 8-K reporting a Truth API customer agreement. The only Item 1.01 (material definitive agreement) filing in that period, on Sept. 30, concerns an amended note with TAE Technologies. A first full quarter of Truth API revenue lands in the third-quarter report, expected roughly Nov. 9 to 16. The second quarter's total revenue was $1,669.7 thousand (10-Q). At the reported $60,000 to $100,000 a month, a single customer for a full quarter is $180,000 to $300,000, or about 11 to 18 percent of a quarter that size. That arithmetic assumes the reported prices are what customers pay and ignores discounts. It shows the 10 percent line is within reach for one customer, not that it has been crossed.
The Foreign and Digital-Coin Question, Narrowed
INFERENCE. Three legal hooks would turn on facts nobody has published. If a buyer were a foreign government or an entity it controls, critics would point to the Foreign Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 9, clause 8), which bars federal officeholders from accepting emoluments from foreign states without Congress's consent. Past suits under that clause were dismissed or ended as moot, so there is no ruling to rely on. If a buyer were a sanctioned party, federal sanctions law would apply to the company. If a payment moved in digital coin, it would matter mainly as a way to obscure the payer. The Old Goat found no evidence of any of the three. The Aug. 7 end of the CRO treasury deal, per the 10-Q, removes the one documented crypto link between the company and a payment channel.
The Price Test
DOCUMENTED, run by the Old Goat on Oct. 15. The script truth_leakage_test.py takes every Trump post in the Old Goat's archive that matches a topic keyword list, chosen before looking at any price, and asks whether futures moved in the post's eventual direction in the 5 or 15 minutes before the post's public timestamp. The same calculation is run at 5,000 sets of random times matched by hour of day, excluding any time within 30 minutes of a post. The window is Aug. 6 to Oct. 15, all after Truth API launched on Aug. 1.
- Oil futures, 56 posts (Iran, oil, sanctions): pre-5-minute drift -1.57 basis points against a random-time mean of 0.08, p = 0.48; pre-15-minute -1.50, p = 0.66.
- S&P 500 futures, 82 posts (tariffs, China, Fed, war, economy): +0.08 bp, p = 0.58; 15-minute +0.33, p = 0.53.
- Nasdaq futures, 24 posts (chips, AI, tariffs): +1.22 bp, p = 0.25; 15-minute +0.81, p = 0.66.
- Bitcoin: no archived posts matched a crypto keyword in the window, so no test.
None of these differs from chance. Read that result with its limits, because they are large. Five-minute bars cannot see a 50-millisecond edge at all, so a null says nothing about whether the feed gives an advantage. It speaks only to larger leaks, such as advance staging or staff knowing before the post. With these sample sizes the oil test could detect a pre-post drift of roughly 5 basis points and the S&P test about 1. Smaller drifts would pass unseen. There is no pre-launch comparison, because free 5-minute data only reaches back about 60 days. The post archive holds only posts with text.
Why Statistics Cannot Produce Names
INFERENCE, with the reasoning. Exchange price and volume data record trades, not traders. The record that ties a trade to a firm and a millisecond is the Consolidated Audit Trail run by FINRA, which regulators can see and the public cannot. The Old Goat's existing timing scan compares SEC Form 4 filings, which executives and directors file, against post dates. The reported Truth API customers are high-frequency firms, data distributors and, per McGurn, prospective news, retail-platform, AI and prediction-market buyers. They do not file Form 4s. A list of "names that come up first" built from public data would be a list of the wrong kind of actor, and any such list would invite exactly the accusation this site's rules forbid. The Old Goat will not publish one.
How Anyone Could Know About Notice and Completeness
The honest answer is that outsiders cannot verify the paid feed at all. Everything the Old Goat can measure is the public side. Here is what was measured on Oct. 15 and what stays unknown.
- Timestamps. DOCUMENTED. Truth Social post ids embed their creation time. Across all 952 archived posts, the time decoded from the id matched the stated creation time to within 0.2 seconds. No archived post shows a stated time that differs from its id time.
- Edits and hidden posts. DOCUMENTED. The Old Goat's new script
truth_post_integrity.pypulled the last 120 posts from the live timeline: none carried an edit mark and none was non-public. Of 51 archived posts in the same stretch, all 51 were still live. - Deleted posts. UNKNOWN. A post deleted between two of the Old Goat's scrapes would never be seen. The script now logs the account's total post count, 37,220 on Oct. 15, so future runs can look for a gap between that count and the posts visible. One data point proves nothing; the log needs weeks.
- Our own blind spot. DOCUMENTED. Of those 120 live posts, 65 had no text, such as image or video posts. The Old Goat's archive drops them, so the price test and the timing scan never saw them.
- Other accounts. UNKNOWN. The feed covers the platform's ten most-followed accounts, reportedly including the White House, FBI Director Kash Patel and Dan Scavino. The Old Goat tracks only the President's.
- Completeness of the feed. UNKNOWN, and not testable from outside. Whether subscribers get anything the public does not could be answered only by a subscriber, a court order or a regulator.
What the Old Goat Thinks It Means
This part is opinion, labeled as opinion. The company has built a product whose central fact, who gets the head start, it declines to disclose, and it describes the head start in a unit, 50 milliseconds, that no outsider can check. The defenses on offer are that the posts are public, that the edge is tiny, and that the practice is common. Each may be true. The test of that is the one thing the public cannot run: match the buyers' trades to the posts. Until a court, a regulator or a subscriber puts the list on the record, the claim stays unprovable in both directions, and the Old Goat thinks that is the part worth being angry about.
Counter-evidence, plainly: the price test found nothing; the company says the edge is milliseconds of internet delivery; every platform sells some kind of data feed; no source reviewed shows a subscriber traded on a post; and no court has ruled the product unlawful.
You cannot audit a head start you are not allowed to see.
The Old Goat will watch for the Intercept ruling, the Q3 10-Q in mid-November, any announcement by the data distributor, a majority-led congressional request, and the integrity log's post-count gap.