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'Go Out and Buy a Dell': Trump Touted 20+ Corporations Days After Buying Their Stock
A CNN analysis shows that President Donald Trump used his social media platform to praise companies in which he recently invested.
Jul 16, 2026
US President Donald Trump used his social media platform—which has nearly 13 million followers—to tout more than 20 different corporations without disclosing at the time that he had purchased the companies' stock just days earlier.
That's according to an analysis published Thursday by CNN, which found that "Trump made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives, or their products." The list of companies includes Nvidia, GE Aerospace, Eli Lilly, Apple, American Eagle, and Boeing.
One example cited by CNN was Trump's purchase of between $200,000 and $500,000 worth of Nvidia shares days before announcing in an April 15, 2025 Truth Social post that "all necessary permits" for the chip giant to "build AI supercomputers" in the US would be "expedited and quickly delivered."
Last year, according to the president's latest financial disclosure, Trump made more than 21,000 stock trades totaling around $1 billion. Trump has supported legislative efforts to ban members of Congress from trading stock but has voiced opposition to extending the proposed ban to the executive branch.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the interim vice president of policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, told CNN that Trump's stock trades and subsequent complimentary posts about the same companies "represent a case study in presidential conflicts of interest."
“This is why we’ve long said government officials should not be able to trade stock while they’re in office,” said Hedtler-Gaudette. “That definitely applies to the president and the disproportionate power of that office.”
Trump's trades and promotion of companies in which he's invested have continued this year.
On February 10, according to financial disclosures, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares in Dell. Just over a week later, during a speech in Rome, Georgia, Trump urged Americans to "go out and buy a Dell computer." In late May, Dell scored a five-year Pentagon contract worth nearly $10 billion.
Year to date, Dell's stock price is up roughly 215%.
“This is an ethics disaster,” Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, told CNN.
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Dell Scores Major Pentagon Contract Weeks After Trump Promoted Company
The on-paper value of the president's Dell stock holdings has soared potentially by millions since he told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell" earlier this month.
May 28, 2026
Just weeks after President Donald Trump urged Americans to "go out and buy a Dell" and months after he bought millions of dollars worth of stock in the company, the computer giant was awarded a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract.
The Department of Defense confirmed the contract with Dell Federal Systems, the government-focused arm of Dell Technologies, on Wednesday.
Euronews reported:
As part of the Core Enterprise Technology Agreement (CETA), a Pentagon-wide Microsoft licensing and software procurement framework, the company will provide and manage Microsoft software licences, cloud subscriptions and on-premises software licensing across the US military, intelligence agencies and the US Coast Guard.
The contract would have raised scrutiny regardless, given the Dell family’s proximity to Trump in his second term. CEO Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, have pledged $6.25 billion to help fund the so-called “Trump accounts” that were part of the president's 2025 mega budget legislation, a policy that critics have described as a tax shelter for the wealthy.
This tied the Dell family fortune to Trump's political agenda. In recent months, he's also hitched it to his own personal wealth.
Follow this:First, Trump quietly buys up to $5 million of Dell stock.Then, he urges his followers to “go out and buy a Dell.”Today, his Pentagon awards a $9.7 billion deal to Dell. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
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— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 7:45 PM
During his frenetic burst of stock trading in the first three months of the year, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Dell stock on February 10, according to financial disclosure forms, when the stock traded at $126 per share.
Months later, at a Mother's Day event on May 8, he publicly shilled for the company's products—a possible violation of White House ethics policy—and lavished praise upon the Dell family:
They've done such a job, such a job on that. They put up a lot of money, too [for Trump accounts]. Put up $6.25 billion. That's somebody and he started making computers on his bed in college and selling them because they were better than other computers.
And he just—I said, "How did you do that?" He said, "Well, I did it and I just never stopped." He just kept going.
So, go out and buy a Dell, they're great.
After the president's remarks, the value of Dell stocks surged by 14.6% to an all-time high of just under $264 before settling at just over $260 by the end of the day.
The announcement of the lucrative new Pentagon deal on Wednesday has caused the stock’s value to soar, reaching nearly $318 per share as of Thursday morning. The value was $305 per share before the announcement.
In total, the share price of Dell stock has climbed by about 155% since Trump bought it back in Feburary. Depending on how much of it he owns, that means he could have unrealized gains of between $1.55 million to $7.74 million. About 47% of those unrealized gains would have come just in the last month since he used the White House to boost Dell stock.
DELL stock chart by TradingView
Acting US Navy Chief Information Officer Barry Tanner has insisted that there was no playing favorites when Dell was selected for the contract.
But Trump, who has increased his net worth by an eye-popping $3 billion since retaking office last year, according to the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has regularly faced accusations of lavish self-dealing.
In fact, a ProPublica report out on Thursday found that his White House adviser, Peter Navarro, personally intervened to push the Pentagon to give a $620 million loan to a startup linked to Donald Trump, Jr., out of dozens of companies that were under consideration.
Dell is also far from the first company to receive a Trump administration contract or other beneficial action after Trump purchased their stock. Earlier this month, NOTUS reported that Trump had bought shares in companies, including Palantir, Axon, and AMD, mere weeks before they were granted government contracts or regulatory relief.
Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council staffer under former President Barack Obama and now the host of the liberal Pod Save America podcast, said on social media that the Dell contract was an example of how “every day there’s another example of insider trading and corruption by Trump himself.”
Noting that Trump’s personal profit from the presidency far exceeds that of anyone else who has held the office, Tim Miller, a journalist and commentator at The Bulwark, said that a contract with such an obvious conflict of interest would be a “front-page story and weekslong scandal for anyone other than Trump.”
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