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Everyone who follows tech remembers the “Something Big is Happening in AI” essay–and President Trump’s brokerage may have read it too.
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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 technology. The trade was disclosed in the 113-page periodic transaction report the Office of Government Ethics released on May 14.
At the same time, the filings show, Trump’s account bought into the “SaaSpocalypse” Shumer’s essay predicted. It purchased ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday and PTC—software names that suffered from sharp drawdowns in the days following Shumer’s essay went viral—most in the $1 million-to-$5 million band (the disclosures don’t show the exact figures of trades, only ranges). And it invested in the picks and shovels of AI: Nvidia, Broadcom and other chip providers; Dell, CDW and Jabil in hardware, distribution and manufacturing; and Synopsys in chip-design software.
The Feb. 10 trade seemed like a bet against the hyperscalers funding a generational bull run, with Goldman Sachs estimating that AI-related investment is driving roughly 40% of the S&P 500’s earnings growth this year. The Trump White House partnered with the four tech companies on data centers and energy; three weeks after the trades, the president would stand with their executives at the White House and tell reporters that the companies “need some PR help” as communities pushed back against the data center boom. The morning before the account sold them, his administration had leaked a planned carveout exempting Google, Amazon and Microsoft from tariffs on the core unit of their business: chips—a policy move that would protect the hyperscalers from one of the biggest cost risks looming over the AI boom. The Dow hit another record that day.
A first look inside a sitting president’s brokerage account
There’s nothing illegal with a sitting president holding positions within the stock market—plenty of presidents have owned corporate stock, mutual funds, or other securities in office. What’s notable about this filing, however, is that it’s raising eyebrows. “It’s an unusual position for a president to be in,” Richard Painter, a securities law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush, told Fortune.
Trump’s new filing appears to offer the first public look in modern presidential history at an active public-markets portfolio in a sitting president’s name. The periodic transaction report the Office of Government Ethics released on May 14 documents 3,642 individual trades made through the account in the first three months of 2026—between $220 million and $750 million in volume at a pace of roughly 60 trades per day. The filing doesn’t always specify whether a given transaction is a stock, bond, or ETF.
“I’ve gone through every president,” Painter said, “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”
Since Lyndon Johnson pioneered the use of a presidential blind trust in 1963, every modern president has either placed their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees, held them in index funds and Treasuries, or, in Jimmy Carter’s case, liquidated all their assets (notoriously, his peanut farm). None have active