On Aug. 18, Donald Trump’s investment accounts bought SpaceX bonds worth between $1 million and $5 million. (Financial disclosures report each trade only as a value range.) SpaceX is Elon Musk’s rocket company and one of the federal government’s largest contractors. On Aug. 20, Trump signed a national space transportation policy directing federal agencies to speed up launch permitting and environmental review and to open federal launch facilities to commercial operators. The purchase came to light on Oct. 8, when the White House released Trump’s financial disclosure for August. It was one of 517 trades that month, totaling somewhere between $74 million and $273 million, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock the day after the space memorandum.
CNN reports:
Just two days before launching an effort to slash red tape for commercial space transportation, President Donald Trump last month purchased up to $5 million of bonds issued by SpaceX, a major federal contractor run by Elon Musk, according to ethics filings made public on Thursday.
The White House says the portfolio is run by third-party managers and that neither Trump nor his family can direct or influence any trade. Even if that is true, the problem remains. The president of the United States holds the debt of a company whose business depends on decisions his administration makes, and his administration then made one of those decisions in the company’s favor two days later. Trump has never placed his assets in a blind trust, so the public has no way to know which of his investments are sitting on the other side of which federal policies.
The president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statute that binds nearly every other executive branch official. That exemption exists because the Framers and later Congresses assumed a president would not need the law to tell him to avoid profiting from his own office. Every previous modern president honored that assumption voluntarily, either by divesting or by holding only broad, diversified funds. Trump has not, and the August filing shows what that looks like in practice: a sitting president who is, among other things, a creditor to Elon Musk.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
