President Donald Trump bought as much as $50,000 worth of SpaceX shares on June 23, according to a financial disclosure first reported by Reuters, two weeks after the record-setting IPO of Elon Musk’s company.
It’s not clear what price Trump paid for the shares, but by that point they had fallen from their highs of over $200. SpaceX shares were trading in the mid-$150 range on June 23. At the end of trading on Monday, shares closed at the IPO price of $135, possibly putting the president’s stake underwater.
Trump and Musk are close, despite a brief falling out last summer that involved the businessman accusing the president of withholding the Department of Justice’s files on Jeffrey Epstein because of how often Trump’s name appears in them. SpaceX has been hoovering up an increasing amount of government contracts and benefiting from the Trump administration’s deregulatory stance, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Reuters that the president’s stock portfolio is managed by third-party financial institutions and replicate “recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.” SpaceX lobbied popular indexes to change their rules to allow for faster inclusion ahead of its IPO, which means many people likely own some of the company’s stock even if they don’t know it.