Behind the Truth API and the White House “insider betting” investigation: what is the real problem, after all — profiting from information, or who monopolizes information and power?
Introduction
On July 16, two pieces of news that seemed to contradict each other appeared at the same time.
Trump Media & Technology Group announced the launch of Truth API, selling financial institutions a low-latency data interface for major Truth Social accounts. The company said the service could deliver machine-readable data to institutional clients at millisecond speed, is scheduled to open on August 1, and is being positioned as a new long-term recurring revenue source. Trump’s remarks often move expectations around tariffs, energy, interest rates, and geopolitical risk, so this temporal advantage can thus be directly converted into financial gain.[1]
That same day, the White House confirmed that Gabriel Pérez, a technical assistant who had long operated Trump’s teleprompter, was suspended and left the White House on suspicion of using speeches he had seen in advance to bet in prediction markets on whether Trump would say certain words. ABC News said that over more than three months he placed bets on more than ten speeches, earning over $100,000; Reuters, meanwhile, reported that Kalshi froze the account before more than $90,000 in profits could be withdrawn, and handed the relevant trades over to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for investigation. Pérez is currently still in the investigation and settlement-consultation stage, and has not yet been found unlawful by a court.[2][3]
One is a Trump-affiliated company turning the transmission speed of market-sensitive information into a product; the other is a staffer allegedly profiting because he knew in advance what the president might say. The former is packaged as a data service, while the latter is called “insider trading.” This juxtaposition raises a sharp question: if Trump’s information can be sold, why can’t the teleprompter operator make money?
Hu Yilin does not think Pérez is necessarily innocent, nor does he deny that leaks, dereliction of duty, and market manipulation may require liability. But he objects to lumping all these different kinds of behavior into a single moral charge of “profiting from work information.” In his view, profit is only the motive or result of an act; it cannot substitute for judging information ownership, confidentiality obligations, and specific harms.
In his view, the real question is not whether someone made money from information, but: did he have the right to disclose that information, did he violate a reasonable duty of confidentiality, did he manipulate the result of his own bets, and why can one person’s words acquire such enormous market value?
Two kinds of information are, in fact, both “prophetic” in nature
The information sold through Truth API and the information involved in Pérez’s trades are not exactly the same. Truth API sells faster, more stable, machine-readable access after a post has already been made public; Pérez is accused of exploiting teleprompter content that Trump had not yet publicly spoken. From the standpoint of current regulatory logic, there is a clear line between the speed advantage of public information and information that has not yet been made public.
But Hu Yilin believes this difference cannot end the discussion. Many of Trump’s remarks on Truth Social are not public policy announced through formal procedures. In his words, “a lot of the time, what he posts is an idea, a comment, or even some emotional outburst.” These words have enormous trading value not because each and every one has already become a government decision, but because the market believes Trump personally has the ability to turn a casual remark into policy reality.
Likewise, text on a teleprompter does not equal a government document that is about to take effect. Trump may not read the script, and what he does read may not turn into concrete policy. On that basis, Hu Yilin points out: “These two kinds of information both have a prophetic, predictive quality.”
What traders are buying is not an already existing policy fact, but a degree of proximity to the next move of the center of power. Therefore, in Hu Yilin’s view, what is truly worth comparing is not “public information” and “secret policy,” but how two people in different positions cash in the temporal advantage of having approached political signals early.
Information asymmetry is not the market’s pollutant, but a resource in the information age
Hu Yilin understands this issue within a longer history of technology. Since the telegraph era, commercial competition has increasingly revolved around who learns earlier about a war, a shipment of goods, a policy, or a price change. Securities traders were among the earliest, and most active, users of long-distance communications technology. The discovery, verification, transmission, and prediction of messages gradually became productive activity in its own right.
In agrarian society, power was often organized around land; in the industrial age, power formed around coal, oil, railways, machines, and capital; once we enter the information age, those who control information sources, interpretive authority, and transmission speed will naturally acquire a new economic position as well.
The information age is not a utopia. Power will still seize resources and try to monopolize them; that is the rule of the game in this era.
Compared with land and oil, information is more fluid and also more easily created by individuals. Hu Yilin emphasizes that “everyone can produce valuable information through their own efforts”; people can create new information resources through investigation, research, invention, and creation. This makes information monopolies perhaps easier to challenge than monopolies over traditional resources, but it does not mean monopolies will disappear automatically.
Precisely for this reason, he opposes treating “profiting from information” itself as suspicious behavior. By that standard, investigative journalism, research institutions selling reports, consulting firms providing judgments, data companies processing intelligence, and even ordinary people making trades on the basis of professional knowledge could all be loosely interpreted as profiting from information asymmetry. The question cannot stop at “you knew earlier than others.”
Profiting, leaking, and manipulating are three different things
Hu Yilin proposes a three-level distinction for this controversy.
The first level is whether a person has the right to disclose the information. Hu Yilin summarizes this distinction as follows: “More precisely, it is not that ‘information cannot be sold,’ but that ‘information cannot be leaked.’” Doctors cannot sell patients’ medical conditions, soldiers cannot sell military deployments, and employees of a company cannot casually leak trade secrets subject to reasonable confidentiality agreements. The reason is not that they cannot profit from information, but that they were never entitled to make this information public in the first place; even if they leak it for free and make not a single cent, the act may still be wrong.
Conversely, if a piece of information originally belongs to content that an individual has the right to make public, then choosing to publish it for free, publish it later, disclose it selectively, or sell it for a fee is, in Hu Yilin’s view, in principle a difference in the way the information is disposed of. Charging money does not conjure up some new guilt out of thin air.
The second level is whether there is a reasonable duty of confidentiality. The current U.S. regulatory framework likewise places “fiduciary duty” at the center. In a public speech in March 2026, the CFTC enforcement division stated that its enforcement of insider trading in prediction markets targets the “misappropriation” of material nonpublic information, that is, a trader has violated the trust or confidentiality obligations owed to the information source; market participants still have the right to trade using knowledge and information they lawfully possess.[4]
Therefore, the real legal focus in the Pérez case is not merely that he saw the speech draft in advance, but whether those contents were subject to clear and legitimate confidentiality constraints, and whether he violated the duties he bore as a White House employee. Hu Yilin also draws a boundary around his own sympathy: “A teleprompter operator is in a gray area, so I merely sympathize; I’m not saying he definitely had the right to sell the information.”
If the relevant contract explicitly stipulates that teleprompter content is secret, and if that agreement itself is reasonable, then he cannot dispose of it at will.
The third level is whether the event on which people are betting has been manipulated. If the operator deliberately alters the teleprompter, deletes a certain word, or uses technical means to influence whether Trump reads a certain passage, then this plainly is no longer just a matter of using information, but rather a breach of duty, interference with the outcome, or even market manipulation.
But Hu Yilin stresses that this kind of wrongdoing and “whether he made money” should still be judged separately.
Even if he did not bet, and merely altered the president’s teleprompter out of a perverse sense of amusement, would that make him innocent? His responsibility depends on whether he violated contract and professional ethics, and whether he caused harm. Profit can explain motive, but it cannot replace a judgment on the act itself.
Within this framework, leaking for free may still be wrong, while profiting may not necessarily be wrong; manipulation without making money is still manipulation, whereas merely using lawful information to make a profit should not automatically be equated with manipulation.
Exclusivity is not created by trading; it already exists within the structure of power
Those who criticize Truth API worry that the president’s remarks, originally visible to everyone, are being divided into different tiers of information: the general public receives them through a page or push notification, while financial institutions pay for faster machine interfaces. Criticism of Pérez is similar: he turned content that could have been made public to everyone when the speech was delivered into an advantage for a small number of traders in advance.
Hu Yilin, however, believes this argument reverses cause and effect. The reason Trump and the teleprompter operator were able to sell this information is precisely that, before the trade took place, they already possessed a temporal advantage that ordinary people did not have. “They did not create exclusivity; they acquired exclusivity.” In his view, trading is not the starting point of exclusivity, but merely transfers to someone else the time of exclusive information that already existed.
Trump is even closer than the operator to the source that actively creates this exclusivity. He can decide when to post and how to post, and he may also influence market expectations through off-the-cuff remarks or ambiguous statements. The teleprompter operator’s advantage, by contrast, comes mainly from his position at work.
Therefore, if the public truly objects to this time gap, it should not only pursue the final sale of the information, but should ask about the institutional source of exclusivity: why can policy directions that may significantly alter the market be released first through the president’s own impromptu speeches or private platforms? Why can the formation of a major policy be understood by the outside world as one person’s temporary decision rather than the result of multi-party consultation, formal documents, and public procedures? Why can’t the government first release formal policy through a unified, searchable public channel with timestamps, and then let politicians offer explanations?
Even on a more concrete level, why should key provisions be carried by a teleprompter system controlled by a technician, rather than by the speaker directly holding the formal document? Hu Yilin therefore criticizes: “If you do not target these root-source issues, and only grab onto this one link of information resale to hold it accountable, then you are putting the cart before the horse.”
If a sentence is worth $100,000, that first of all means power is too concentrated
Hu Yilin believes that the reason Trump’s remarks can be packaged as expensive data products is not merely the speed of technical transmission, but the fact that in reality U.S. public power has become overly dependent on an individual’s will. He asks: “Why can Trump’s words sell at such a high price? That itself is because Trump acts with complete authority; power is too concentrated.”
If a country’s policy requires the participation of multiple departments, Congress, the courts, local governments, and social groups, then any one person’s words can only be one signal among many. Conversely, if the market believes the president can rapidly change the direction of tariffs, diplomacy, and regulation, then every word he says acquires a value close to that of an option.
In his view, if the policy-forming process includes more participants, then discussants, aides, officials, and even conference staff may all come into contact with different fragments, and the monopoly of a single source of information will instead be weakened. Banning all peripheral personnel from exploiting information does not necessarily make information more public; it may simply preserve the gains from exclusive access at the center of power. Here too there emerges the most controversial judgment in the whole set of views: if a policy is in fact decided by Trump’s say-so, then the information gains he obtains from this de facto control are merely a derivative result of concentrated power. If critics only object to the profits while accepting the continued high concentration of power, then they have not touched the root of the problem. Opponents will say that public power is not the president’s private property, but power entrusted to him by the public to exercise; even if the system grants him decision-making capacity, he has no right to design the decision-making process specifically as a tool for his own profit. The purpose of conflict-of-interest rules is precisely to prevent private gain from turning around and steering public decision-making. Hu Yilin does not deny that private interests may affect politics. His rebuttal is more realistic: politics has never been a pure realm that excludes private interests. Capital, industries, unions, regions, classes, and identity groups all compete for interests in elections and policy. American party politics itself is a institutional form in which different coalitions of interests compete. The aim of democratic politics should not be to pretend that participants have no private motives, but to make the contest over interests as open and equal as possible, and subject to checks by other forces. Has politics ever really had nothing to do with private profit motives, as if it were merely a contest of pure ideas? Democratic politics should originally be the final result of the clash of private interests among different camps. Why is it only at the stage of policy announcement that people suddenly remember to exclude private interests? In his view, conflict-of-interest rules may perhaps reduce some direct abuse, but they cannot replace the dispersal of power. Otherwise, the system may produce a strange moral order: it allows one person to decide the direction of the market, and only grows angry when he makes money in public. ## “Banning insider information” may be a kind of market illusion The CFTC’s current position is quite clear: prediction markets are not a lawless zone for insider trading. The regulator holds that betting with information obtained through violations of existing confidentiality or fiduciary duties harms market integrity and participants’ trust, and may constitute conduct prohibited by anti-fraud rules.[4] Hu Yilin directly challenges this market ethic. He states bluntly: “In fact, first, you can’t prohibit it; second, participants actually aren’t averse to insider information—many times, they imagine they themselves have insider information.” In his view, prediction markets exist precisely because participants do not possess the same knowledge, judgment, and information; many people enter the market because they believe they understand events earlier than others, and even think they have some kind of inside information. Especially after on-chain prediction markets such as Polymarket expanded, anonymous accounts, cross-border trading, and self-custodied assets made it easier for insiders to profit covertly. The fact that Perez was discovered was accidental; it does not mean that all similar trades can be monitored. Prohibitory rules may mainly constrain those whose identities are transparent and easy to track, while failing to stop those who are truly skilled at hiding. Therefore, he argues that rather than maintaining the illusion that there are no insiders in the market, it is better to let information inequality be exposed openly. “If ordinary participants wake up, realize that ‘there are insiders everywhere,’ and exit the market, that is a good thing, a positive consequence.” In Hu Yilin’s view, exiting does not necessarily mean the market has been damaged; it may also mean participants have finally correctly recognized their own informational position. This view shifts the foundation of market fairness from “participants obtaining roughly equal information” to “whether participants voluntarily accept information inequality.” It directly conflicts with the regulator’s stance that treats market trust as a public good. From the regulator’s perspective, even if every bettor participates voluntarily, the market still needs rules to prevent entrusted information from being misappropriated; from Hu Yilin’s perspective, trying to ensure all participants are in roughly the same informational position is both unrealistic and may become an excuse for protecting existing informational hierarchies. ## Freedom may consolidate monopoly, but banning freedom is not necessarily better Hu Yilin does not deny that freely selling information may create new intermediaries of information, paid circles, and markets for proximity to power. Large financial institutions can buy and integrate more fragments, while ordinary people remain at a disadvantage. But he believes that every freedom comes with similar risks. Land can be freely bought and sold; historically, this may have driven enclosure and land concentration, turning landless peasants into proletarians; but that does not mean a system in which land cannot be traded and can only be inherited by status is more reasonable. In principle, we always pursue freedom and openness. This does not mean ignoring the costs and risks of freedom, but how to respond to them is another issue. He also refuses to provide a complete reform blueprint that can solve all risks in advance. For him, principles should come before details: first, acknowledge that the holder of information has the freedom to dispose of information on the premise of not leaking secrets, not breaching contracts, and not manipulating; as for the scope of confidentiality, contractual terms, platform rules, and transparency mechanisms, these should continue to be contested by unions, industry organizations, media, voters, legislators, and market participants. This is not to say that details are unimportant, but rather to oppose using “the details are not yet settled” as a reason to default to maintaining the monopoly of the center of power over information. ## What ordinary people need is not necessarily beating Wall Street In the end, this dispute returns again to the position of ordinary people. Hu Yilin does not believe that once information trading is opened up, everyone can win in the market. Quite the contrary, he says plainly: “Ordinary people should not confidently go and compete in fields that depend heavily on information asymmetry. It’s fine to play around, but if you really think you can win, forget it.” In the competition for key resources in any era, ordinary people are often at a disadvantage; precisely because they are at a disadvantage, they are ordinary people. In his view, institutional justice should not be built on a false imagination of universal financial elite status. But that does not mean ordinary people can only passively accept informational hierarchies. Hu Yilin says: “Ordinary people can grasp their own sources of information through personal investigation and research, and produce their own new information through creation and invention; this is the relatively free part.” It is just that no individual has reason to believe that he can for a long time defeat large institutions with dedicated lines, algorithms, professional teams, and political connections. This is also why he connects the controversy over prediction markets with Bitcoin. He believes that “the fiat-currency system has a dual monopoly”: a small number of central decision-makers hold monetary policy, while the entire market is forced to pay close attention to these people’s wording and expressions; at the same time, long-term currency depreciation makes it difficult for ordinary people to preserve the fruits of their labor through saving alone. “In order to preserve their wealth, ordinary people must also be forced to join the capital market—a game market highly dependent on information asymmetry.” In such a structure, ordinary people not only find it hard to win, but also find it hard to choose not to participate. What Hu Yilin appreciates about Bitcoin is not that it can eliminate all wealth and informational inequality, but that its public ledger, relatively slow confirmation mechanism, and predetermined issuance rules weaken the ability of central figures to change monetary conditions through temporary statements. The information age cannot abolish informational advantage, but it can try to reduce people’s forced dependence on a handful of centers of power. What ordinary people need may not only be “to participate in the game more fairly,” but also to be able to preserve the fruits of their labor, thereby possessing the right to refuse to participate in the game. ## The problem is not selling, but monopoly Whether Perez ultimately violated the White House’s confidentiality obligations, Kalshi’s rules, or U.S. law remains to be determined by the investigation’s conclusions. This individual case cannot be judged legally on sympathy alone. But the public problem it reveals should not end with the words “insider trading.” Whether information may be sold should at least be broken down into several different questions: whether the holder of the information has the right to disclose it, whether the confidentiality obligation is legitimate, whether anyone suffered specific harm, whether the trader manipulated the outcome, and why public power created such enormous information rents. If a doctor leaks a patient’s condition, the issue is violation of privacy; if a soldier leaks deployment plans, the issue is damage to national security; if an operator tampers with a teleprompter, the issue is dereliction and manipulation. One cannot, because these acts may be accompanied by profit, take “profit” itself as the common root of all wrongdoing. Likewise, when a business affiliated with the president can sell market-sensitive information at speed, while peripheral staff are punished for using their own access advantage, society at least needs to explain: what exactly is being protected here—reasonable confidentiality obligations, the fair expectations of market participants, or the hierarchical order in which the center of power monopolizes information rents? If we are dissatisfied that someone has harvested huge profits by monopolizing information, the target should be the monopoly, not the sale. We need to find a way to stop him from monopolizing information and power, rather than merely trying to limit his sale of information. This conclusion is not necessarily easy to accept. Allowing more people to sell messages may expand speculation, corruption, and markets for proximity to power; but simply banning lower-level personnel from profiting will likewise not automatically make public information equal. The real contrast in the two news items may lie precisely here: a system can denounce the use of insider information, while at the same time allowing the most powerful people to decide when something becomes insider information, when it becomes public information, and who is qualified to sell the time gap between the two. ## Explanation of information sources and factual status Explanation of factual status: As of July 20, 2026, Perez is under CFTC investigation and in settlement negotiations; public materials do not show that he has been convicted by a court. Public reports differ slightly on the framing of the earnings; this article separately preserves the wording of ABC News and Reuters. [1] Trump Media and Technology Group Launches Truth API, a New Licensed Data Service for Financial Services Partners That Provides the Fastest Access to Truth Social’s Most Influential Accounts, company announcement archived by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, July 16, 2026. [2] Trump’s teleprompter operator under CFTC probe over potential insider trading, Reuters, published July 16, 2026, updated July 17.[3] White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches: Sources, ABC News, July 16, 2026.
[4] Remarks at NYU Law School – CFTC Enforcement Priorities, Insider Trading in the Prediction Markets, and Cooperation with the CFTC, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, March 31, 2026.
[5] Trump firm plans to sell priority access to Truth Social posts, possibly his own, Associated Press, July 16, 2026.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply