Trump has been one of Dell’s loudest unofficial salespeople. “Go out and buy a Dell computer,” he told a crowd in Rome, Georgia, on Feb. 19 — nine days after his account bought $1 million to $5 million of Dell shares, when the stock traded around $126.
The White House says the president doesn’t choose the investments. Spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC they are independently managed through discretionary accounts and computer-based models, with “no ability” for Trump or his family to influence decisions.
The Trump Organization manages the president’s brokerage accounts and says third-party financial institutions oversee the trades. “Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” the company wrote in a statement provided to Yahoo Finance.
In the months between the purchase and the sales, Dell’s stock went on an absolute tear. Shares traded around $563 in late September, up about 350% for the year. But the filings list dollar ranges instead of exact figures, so they don’t show what the account received for its Dell shares or how many it still owns.
What Trump’s financial disclosures reveal about his Dell stock trades
Senior executive branch officials have to report stock and bond trades over $1,000 to the Office of Government Ethics within 30 days of learning about them, and no later than 45 days after the trade itself. Congress created the requirement in the STOCK Act, which President Obama signed in 2012.
For Trump, those reports run long. The newest one lists 517 transactions in August alone, and he has disclosed more than 9,200 trades in the first eight months of 2026, according to Yahoo Finance. The biggest single August trade was a purchase somewhere in the range of $5 million to $25 million in Meta stock.
Dell was one name among the many Trump sold on Aug. 21. The president’s account also sold stakes in Boeing, Home Depot, T-Mobile, Datadog, Palo Alto Networks and Nvidia that day, each in the same $500,001 to $1 million range, CNBC reported. It sold $1 million to $5 million each of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Church & Dwight.
The Dell position traces back to the first quarter. Filings released in May showed the account bought Dell in the $1 million to $5 million range on Feb. 10, then added smaller purchases, for a total of up to about $5.1 million across the quarter, as Moneywise reported at the time.
Trump kept talking up the company after that. At a White House Mother’s Day event on May 8, he told the audience to buy a Dell, and the stock hit a record high that day. On July 6, at the Oval Office ceremony marking the first day of trading for Trump Accounts, he made the same pitch, and Dell shares rose more than 7%, Quartz reported.
Of AI and Trump Accounts
It’s true that Dell’s rally has plenty of company-specific fuel. Dell has become one of the biggest suppliers of AI-optimized servers, built around chips like Nvidia’s, that data centers use to train and run AI models. In its fiscal second quarter that ended July 31, Dell booked a record $60.9 billion in AI server orders and finished with a $95 billion backlog (orders customers have placed that Dell hasn’t delivered yet), according to the company’s earnings release. Revenue climbed 58% to a record $47 billion, and Dell raised its full-year sales forecast by $25 billion to $192 billion.
