"Absolutely corrupt" How Donald Trump enriches himself with Dell shares
In January and February, Donald Trump advertises Dell computers conspicuously often. It now emerges that the president himself bought shares in the company before the Pentagon awarded it a major contract.
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- "Go and buy Dell computers": Donald Trump is promoting the American technology company in a strikingly euphoric way this spring.
- This seems understandable: founder Michel Dell and his wife donated 6.25 billion dollars for children at the end of 2025.
- It has now come to light that Trump bought shares in the company in February and March, before the Pentagon awarded Dell a contract worth almost 10 billion dollars at the end of May.
- The share price has risen by 240 percent since Trump's purchase in February.
You have to hand it to Donald Trump, who is still 79 years old: When it comes to technology, the man is at the cutting edge. He has invested in cryptocurrencies and the financial platform World Liberty Financial. His government is promoting AI projects and new nuclear reactors.
The New Yorker also has a heart for information technology - and it has recently been beating particularly loudly for a domestic manufacturer: this year, Trump has repeatedly praised technology manufacturer Dell, which was founded by Michael Dell in 1984 and made a profit of 3.21 billion dollars in 2024.
Trump beats the advertising drum
"I hope everybody goes out and buys Dell computers. My son Barron loves this computer," said Trump in a speech on January 28.
On February 19, in a speech actually dedicated to the economy of the city of Rome in the state of Georgia, he praises: "Go out and buy Dell computers. [...] You make a good product."
He also used the State of the Union address on February 24 to drum up publicity: "When I asked Michael Dell, 'How do you make all that money?' he said, 'Well, I just sat in my dorm room at school and built computers and sold them to people. And I sold and sold and sold.' Pretty great story. That's what they call the American dream. He sold a lot of computers, a lot of those laptops. I congratulate him on that."
On February 27, he doubles down: "Dell computers, go out and buy a Dell computer."
Now you have to see these songs of praise in context. After all, the US company based in Rock Round, Texas, employs around 120,000 people. According to the business magazine "Fortune", its parent company Dell Technologies is one of the 50 largest companies in the country.
Dell's donation for the Trump accounts
Trump has another good reason to be grateful to the company founder: In December, Michael and Susan Dell announced they were donating 6.25 billion dollars to create funds for American children of 1,000 dollars each. They will only be able to access these funds when they reach the age of majority.
6.25 billion dollars - there has never been a donation this large. On the other hand, Michael Dell can cope with his generosity: with an estimated fortune of 255 billion dollars, the 61-year-old is one of the ten richest people on the planet. Incidentally, the president can also benefit from the funds: they have been christened Trump Accounts.
It is therefore not surprising that Trump praises Dell to the skies - and his calls to buy are paying off. One statement from May 8 alone caused the share price to rise by 13.11 percent to a new record of 260.46 dollars per share. That is almost 106.91 percent more than in the previous year, according to "TradingKey".
Trump buys Dell shares in February and March
What was not known at the time, however, was that Donald Trump himself had already bought Dell shares on February 10. The value is between one and five million dollars, writes CNBC, citing the Office of Government Ethics. On the same day, he also acquired shares in the technology company Nvidia, the world's leading developer of graphics processors. A week later, a major chip deal with Meta was announced.
In March, Trump bought Dell shares three more times, according to Forbes. A record is broken in the same month: The value rises by 31.6 percent in one day. But this record was soon broken again.
On May 27, the Pentagon awards the company a major contract: Dell is to revise the software of the Ministry of Defense for 9.7 billion dollars over five years. By May 29, the share price had shot up by 32.1 percent. Michael Dell's fortune increases by 35 billion dollars as a result of the contract and the jump in the share price, adds "Forbes".
"No other president would get away with it"
Since Trump's investment on February 10, Dell's share price has already shot up 240 percent - and it is his ministry that has helped with the jump. This smacks of insider trading - and has critics up in arms. However, the transactions are not wrong: ethical guidelines for senators, for example, do not apply to the president.
Nevertheless, "Awarding a nearly $10 billion contract to a company closely tied to a friend and donor of the president seems like an obvious conflict of interest," says Greg Williams of the Washington-based NGO Project on Government Oversight to the politics and news site The Hill.
"This is absolutely corrupt," Tara Setmayer of the nonpartisan super PAC Seneca Project goes further on CNN. "This is outrageous. No other president would get away with a conflict of interest like this. Not just Trump himself, but his entire family makes billions of dollars."
