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Influence

SpaceX, Palantir, McDonald’s: Trump Made 517 Personal Financial Trades in August

Federal records detail the president’s latest stock and bond spree.

Trump.McDonalds

President Donald Trump’s love for McDonald’s extends to ownership of seven-figures worth of the restaurant company’s stock. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

By Mark Alfred

October 8, 2026 02:30 p.m.

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President Donald Trump made 517 personal trades of stocks, bonds or other financial funds in August, many disclosed past a federal deadline for publicly revealing them.

Trump disclosed a filing published Thursday by the independent Office of Government Ethics.

Trump made some multi-million-dollar adjustments to his portfolio in August, including purchases between $1 million and $5 million each in Microsoft, McDonald’s and Comcast stock.

Those trades are among the 125 that Trump reported late in violation of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, which he also violated last month when he separately disclosed 1,156 trades made in July.

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Trump added heavily to his position in Meta Platforms; he bought between $5 million and $25 million on Aug. 21, his largest transaction in August. (Federal law only requires officeholders to disclose the value of each trade in broad ranges, not exact amounts.)

That same day, Trump ditched a slate of computer chip stocks — AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom and Microchip — and hardware and cybersecurity companies including Dell, CDW, Fortinet, Datadog, CrowdStrike, Vertiv and Ciena.

Those sales coincided with Trump’s purchases in the media, oil and telecommunications sectors, with buys in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, AT&T, Netflix, Disney and General Mills. The AT&T and Netflix purchases were each valued at between $1 million and $5 million.

A White House spokesperson previously told The Washington Sun that “President Trump’s stock and bond portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions.”

Trump, however, personally signs off on his financial disclosures, indicating that he is personally aware of trades being made on his behalf and what stocks and bonds he owns.

The president has routinely bought and sold stocks of companies who do significant business with, or are heavily regulated by, the federal government. On Thursday, Trump accused Microsoft and Adobe — he owned stock in both companies, as of Aug. 31 — of fraud and barred them from receiving access to new green cards for foreign workers.

Trump’s Intel transaction, a sale valued at between $100,000 and $250,000, comes as the federal government has purchased a 10% stake in the company — an arrangement made by the Trump administration.

Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million in unsecured SpaceX corporate bonds. SpaceX has received billions of dollars in government contracts since Trump took office last year despite the president’s on-again, off-again relationship with its trillionaire owner, Elon Musk.

Trump is a big trader of health care stocks. In August, he bought shares in drug, vaccine and health device manufacturers — Pfizer, Moderna, Abbott, Medtronic, Stryker and Boston Scientific — while selling insurers such as UnitedHealth, Cigna and Alignment Healthcare.

The president also sold shares of Versant Media Group, the parent company of MS NOW, one of the networks Trump has tried to bar from the White House.

Author

fellow2024_mark_alfred_500px.png Mark Alfred is a reporter at The Washington Sun and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.

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