Donald Trump made a flurry of trades on a tech company just as his administration announced a major agreement with the same firm, according to the president’s own financial declarations.
The president bought bonds in an AI company in the days before it was announced that the firm had been selected for a government program. He then sold bonds in the same company one day after the announcement, which boosted the company’s share price, an investigation by the Daily Beast and its sister Substack PunchUp has found.
The trade comes to light just days after it was reported that Trump was fined $200 for late filing of disclosures on tens of millions of dollars in stock market trading. Forbes estimates that Trump has personally made more than a billion dollars since he was re-elected president.
Trump has pursued a massive overhaul of the AI sector since entering the White House for the second time, slashing back regulations and loosening oversight of major tech firms in what critics have slammed as a windfall for his billionaire backers. He and his family also hold sizable investments in the market, prompting widespread concern over possible conflicts of interest.
The president’s efforts have partly taken shape in the form of his so-called “Genesis Mission,” an initiative the White House says is designed to harness AI in the fields of scientific research and innovation. The Department of Energy announced on Dec. 18 that AI startup CoreWeave had joined the program—news that sent its stock price up almost 20 percent.
Trump’s accounts show he made two purchases of CoreWeave bonds worth between $250,001 and $500,000 each, for a max total of $1 million, in the week before the announcement, according to the president’s financial disclosures, compiled by ProPublica and reviewed by the Daily Beast and PunchUp.
The day after the news broke, he sold those bonds for a total of between $1 million and $5 million—a much higher bracket than he’d bought them in only days before.
It’s a complicated picture, with exact amounts impossible to pin down because the documents contain only estimated ranges for the value of the transactions. Trump could have made millions. He could have made nothing.
What’s clear is that whatever the upshot of the sale, it did nothing to dissuade the president from buying more bonds worth between $1 million and $5 million the same day, and worth up to a further $1.25 million the following month.
The Daily Beast contacted the White House for comment on this story, which referred questions to the Trump Organization. A spokesperson for the company said the president’s investment decisions are made by independent financial managers, rather than Trump himself.
“Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” the spokesperson said. “They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind.”
Forbes reported earlier in January that Trump’s net worth now stands at $6.5 billion, marking a $1.4 billion increase over the course of his second presidency so far. Much of that gain has been driven by Trump’s expanding portfolio in tech, the same sector across which his administration has been gutting regulations and rolling back oversight.
His media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, announced a $6 billion merger in December with a nuclear fusion firm aimed at powering AI data centers. The deal landed just a week after the president signed an executive order effectively curbing state and local governments’ power to enact their own AI regulations.
Trump Media is also reported to have accumulated roughly $2 billion in digital assets alone between January and July last year, while Trump family members made roughly $1.55 billion from sales of tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, a crypto-venture set up by the president’s elder sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr.
