In December, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor highlighted a partnership between financial services company Robinhood Markets Inc. and the Trump administration that temporarily places skilled private-sector tech workers in federal government jobs.
“We’re doing this in partnership with about 25 of the tech companies that you all know and love — so, you know, Coinbase, Robinhood, Databricks, Snowflake, NVIDIA, xAI, OpenAI,” Kupor told technology news show TBPN in explaining the Trump administration’s “US Tech Force” initiative.
What Kupor didn’t say: He has maintained massive personal financial interests in Robinhood. And last month, the OPM director exercised stock call options and sold seven figures worth of his Robinhood shares, according to new federal ethics records reviewed by NOTUS.
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Kupor’s Robinhood stock sales on June 18 are together worth between $1.7 million and $3.5 million, a disclosure document filed with the Office of Government Ethics indicates.
They came on a day when Robinhood’s stock price closed at $108.15 per share — up significantly from the year-to-date low closing price of $65.16 on March 30.
In recent days, Robinhood stock has generally traded between $85 and $95 per share.
Robinhood has other ties to President Donald Trump’s administration.
Kupor and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev are both quoted in a press release detailing the Tech Force initiative. Robinhood is meanwhile working with the Treasury Department to launch and maintain an app for the government’s new Trump Accounts program, which aims to provide children with tax-deferred investment accounts. And Robinhood offered prediction market contracts on matters involving the federal government, including government shutdowns, which OPM monitors.
Kupor also reported exercising stock call options and selling between $3 million and $12 million worth of stock in Okta Inc. on June 18, according to ethics records. Okta, an identity verification tech company, is a federal government contractor.
In an ethics agreement Kupor signed last year prior to his Senate confirmation, he agreed to take steps to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest” and divest of dozens of personal investments. He also resigned from various corporate posts and positions.
In a statement to NOTUS, OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said Kupor “went through a full financial review with [the Office of Government Ethics] prior to his confirmation hearing and agreed to all divestitures and recusals proposed by OGE. Neither Okta nor Robinhood were suggested by OGE as divestitures since OPM has no financial relationship with either company.”
The OGE declined to comment on Kupor’s personal investments.
The agency’s published “conflicts of interest considerations” guidance states that “an employee who owns stock options is prohibited from participating personally and substantially in any particular matter that the employee knows would have a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of the issuer of the underlying security.”
Walter Shaub, who served as director of the Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, said Trump has set an “anything goes” standard for how his top lieutenants can invest their personal assets. The president reported thousands of stock and bond trades during the past year and has routinely engaged in private crypto and other business ventures since returning to the White House in 2025.
“It has seemed to me that the president’s appointees are doing a whole lot of buying and selling investments. That’s not something you saw happening much in the past Democratic or Republican administrations,” Shaub said.
“The problem is that letting presidential appointees play the market is a recipe for disaster,” Shaub added. “There’s no way for the public to know which government decisions are made because they’ll be lucrative for administration officials instead of being made because they’re what’s best for the American people.”
In recent months, several top Trump administration officials have made notable personal financial trades or deals while serving in public office.
They include FBI Director Kash Patel, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Ambassador to Italy Tilman Fertitta, Federal Highway Administration Administrator Sean McMaster, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, former U.S. Agency for Global Media leader Kari Lake, Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Pedro Allende, Environmental Protection Agency Assistant Administrator Douglas Troutman and former Department of Health and Human Services general counsel Mike Stuart.
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