How Trump’s ‘unusual’ brokerage account traded around his own market-moving decisions—selling hyperscalers and buying energy stocks during the war
Everyone who follows tech remembers the “Something Big is Happening in AI” essay–and President Trump’s brokerage may have read it too. On Feb. 10, an AI founder named Matt Shumer published a 5,000-word essay arguing that most of the world was sleepwalking into a crisis akin to coronavirus, but only tech people knew what was coming. The essay would be viewed nearly 87 million times and crystallized a fear that would engulf Wall Street by the end of the month: AI wasn’t just a boom story. The technology could hollow out entire industries like software engineering, which had been investors’ golden child. The day Shumer published the essay, Wall Street didn’t panic. Instead, the Dow closed at a record. But for one brokerage account, something big was happening indeed. The account in question is held in the name of President Donald Trump. According to a spokesperson from the Trump Organization, the Trump family’s privately held conglomerate, the accounts are operated by third-party financial institutions, which have “sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” Trades, the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Fortune, are executed through “automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization play “any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.” Davis Ingle, a spokesperson for the White House, told Fortune that Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” and “there are no conflicts of interest.”When asked about the apparent tension with the Trump Organization’s statement that the third-party institutions are the “sole” authority over the trades, Ingle told Fortune to “defer to Trump Org.” On Feb. 10, in the account’s biggest move of the quarter, it sold $5 million-to-$25 million each of Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta—the AI hyperscalers cast as central to American dominance in the te