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When President Donald Trump rang the opening bell of the stock market from the Oval Office on Monday surrounded by Cabinet officials and CEOs, he thanked billionaire couple Michael and Susan Dell\u2014standing mere feet away from him\u2014for their contributions to his namesake investment accounts for children.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are truly incredible people, go out and buy a Dell computer,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to get him that money back one way or the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Afterward, Dell shares rose as much as nearly 9% before closing up 4.4%, the third trading day since February when Trump\u2019s public praise of Dell coincided with a same-day stock gain, raising a political and financial question: How much of Dell\u2019s extraordinary run is Trump, and how much is just Dell being good at selling servers to companies building AI data centers?<\/p>\n
One of the most closely followed voices in enterprise hardware thinks the answer is the hyperscalers were always going to write Dell checks for its AI servers, and a former White House ethics lawyer thinks the question is a distraction from a simpler one: Presidents aren\u2019t supposed to pick winners to begin with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nine days before Trump first told the crowd to buy Dell in February, an account bearing his name bought Dell stock\u2014between $1 million and $5 million of it disclosed in the annual financial filing Fortune<\/em> previously reported. Then came the endorsement wave: In Rome, Ga., on Feb. 19; a White House Mother\u2019s Day luncheon on May 8 (where Trump named Michael and Susan Dell directly and credited their pledge to Trump Accounts in the same breath); and the July 6 opening bell.\u00a0<\/p>\n On three trading days\u2014Feb. 19, May 8, and July 6\u2014Michael Dell\u2019s paper wealth rose by an estimated $606 million, $8.0 billion and $4.6 billion, respectively. Those same-day, gross figures are based on Dell\u2019s closing stock moves that don\u2019t isolate the effect of Trump\u2019s comments from other market forces. Dell\u2019s current net worth is $217 billion, making him the world\u2019s fifth-richest man.<\/p>\n In between those endorsements, on May 27, the Department of Defense awarded Dell a five-year contract worth up to $9.7 billion to consolidate Microsoft software licensing. The value is a ceiling, not necessarily immediate revenue to Dell.<\/p>\n Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pushed back on any narrative that centers the government in Dell\u2019s success, telling Fortune<\/em> Dell\u2019s stock is surging because of business from hyperscalers, and not Trump\u2019s praise.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOnce they got attached to the AI trade, and they started selling a ton to the big neoclouds, that\u2019s how this whole thing started,\u201d Moorhead said, describing a \u201ctwo-horse race\u201d between Dell and Supermicro for the largest AI server accounts.<\/p>\n Dell\u2019s biggest recent stock move came after earnings: Shares jumped 32.8% on May 29, the day after Dell reported record quarterly revenue, $24.4 billion in AI orders, $16.1 billion in AI server revenue, and raised its full-year AI server revenue expectations to roughly $60 billion.<\/p>\n Moorhead said Trump\u2019s endorsements of Dell might have only moved retail investors, not institutional ones that already invest in Dell because of its fundamentals.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no institutional investors that have ever said: \u2018Oh, Trump said this, increase the valuation by this\u2019\u2014it\u2019s all retail,\u201d Moorhead told Fortune<\/em>, noting that paying attention to Trump\u2019s public comments about a company is closer to an Internet joke than an actual investment approach.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a meme that says: \u2018I just should have listened to Trump\u2019\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush\u2019s administration, told Fortune<\/em> Trump trading Dell stock was \u201cegregious,\u201d but even if he hadn\u2019t done that, the president praising Dell at all flies against federal standards of conduct for executive branch employees.<\/p>\n \u201cThe baseline rule is, even if the president is not trading, there should never be an endorsement of a particular company,\u201d Painter said. \u201cI would have been absolutely furious if someone had suggested that President Bush should do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Painter pointed out the same regulation has barred officials from endorsing private companies \u201cfor decades\u201d in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Asked directly whether \u201cgo out and buy a Dell computer\u201d counts as the kind of endorsement the rule prohibits, Painter didn\u2019t equivocate.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s an endorsement,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s clearly a statement that this is a company that has a good business plan\u2026you don\u2019t say: \u2018Go buy this company\u2019s stock, even though the company is no better than the others.\u201d<\/p>\n He explained Trump\u2019s endorsement of Dell could move the market because investors assume Trump knows when Dell is about to land a federal contract that would make the company more valuable, and will trade on that assumption after Trump\u2019s praise.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe Donald Trump\u2019s about to give them a big government contract or he knows that someone\u2019s going to give them a big DoD contract, and there must be something going on that I don\u2019t know that he does know about this company and its relationship with the federal government, and lo and behold, Dell does have federal contracts,\u201d Painter said about investors\u2019 reasoning.\u00a0<\/p>\n The White House told Fortune<\/em> Trump \u201cwas rightfully praising the Dells among many other wealthy individuals and corporations\u201d for donating to the Trump accounts and described the Dells as \u201cpatriots who are generously contributing billions of dollars of their fortune to the Trump Accounts of millions of kids from working-class families.\u201d<\/p>\n Dell did not respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2018s request for comment.<\/p>\n Long before Trump began praising Dell from the White House, Michael Dell had learned the value of being in the room with presidents.\u00a0<\/p>\n Under George W. Bush, he served on the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a private sector brain trust advising the White House on innovation and technology policy. Under former President Barack Obama, he joined a small group of tech CEOs at the White House to discuss trade, cybersecurity, immigration, tax reform, exports, and competitiveness.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Trump\u2019s public boosterism is more explicit\u2014and potentially more market-moving\u2014Dell\u2019s cultivation of presidential access is not new.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMichael has had relationships with every single president that has shown up,\u201d Moorhead, who has been tracking Dell for years, noted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Painter described how often CEOs sought political access during the Bush years and how deliberately his office tried to block it. But Dell has cast the $6.25 billion gift as a philanthropic rather than political investment. He described the Invest America initiative\u2014the formal name of Trump Accounts\u2014as a bipartisan platform, and argued even a small early savings stake can expand a child\u2019s sense of possibility.<\/p>\n But Dell\u2019s proximity to Trump did not begin with Trump Accounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n In January 2017, days into Trump\u2019s first term, Michael Dell was already in the White House orbit, joining other CEOs in on\u00a0 Trump\u2019s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and publicly describing a meeting with the president as a discussion about growing the U.S. economy. Later that year, Dell stayed in Trump\u2019s manufacturing council even as other executives broke away after Trump appeared to defend white nationalists in Charlottesville.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Presidents #arent #supposed #pick #winners #White #House #ethics #lawyer #Trump #choosing #Dell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When President Donald Trump rang the opening bell of the stock market from the Oval Office on Monday surrounded by Cabinet officials and CEOs, he thanked billionaire couple Michael and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1972,1108,4625,914,665,12148,1338,6902,915,26,12713,5988,260,1337,326],"class_list":["post-11078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-arent","tag-choosing","tag-dell","tag-dell-technologies","tag-donald-trump","tag-ethics","tag-house","tag-lawyer","tag-michael-dell","tag-pick","tag-presidents","tag-supposed","tag-trump","tag-white","tag-winners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}One side: Dell is doing well without Trump\u2019s aid<\/h2>\n
The other side: Sitting presidents shouldn\u2019t be praising companies to begin with<\/h2>\n
Michael Dell\u2019s relationship with Trump<\/h2>\n