At least 10 members of Congress traded Tesla stock after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump—collectively making more than three dozen trades worth up to $1.27 million—raising fresh concerns about conflicts of interest, as Musk gains sweeping power over federal regulations.
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00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now
00:07is Forbes staff writer, Zach Everson. Zach, thanks so much for joining me.
00:11Thanks for having me back, Brittany.
00:13Elon Musk endorsed President Trump over the summer, and ever since then,
00:17he has been a top advisor to the president. You have some reporting that a handful of
00:22lawmakers started trading Tesla stock soon after that endorsement. What can you tell us?
00:27Yeah, so what really brought this to my attention was a few weeks ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene filed
00:35a disclosure showing that she had traded Tesla stock, and we reported about that. We've done
00:40some videos on that, and I decided to kind of take the next step. All right, we've seen she's trading
00:45it. Who else is trading it? So we used a website really handy up there called Capital Trades,
00:51and it just takes publicly available information from these house disclosures. It puts them in a
00:56very readable format in a database. So you could just go and search to see which lawmakers have
01:00traded Tesla. And so I just ran that search, looked back to July 13th, which was the day
01:06that Musk endorsed Trump, and then went back and looked through the actual filings for all these
01:11members of Congress just to verify that Capital Trades data was correct. And we found that at least
01:1710 members of Congress have made a total of more than three dozen trades that are collectively worth
01:24about $1.27 million in Tesla stock. Now, that's a high. They only report them in broad ranges.
01:30So the amount could be anywhere from $340,000 to $1.27 million.
01:36So the high is over a million. That is pretty high. So I want to know more about these lawmakers.
01:41Who are they? Because as we know, at the time, July 13th, President Trump was the Republican
01:47nominee. Elon Musk endorsed him. Were these lawmakers all Republican? Were these trades
01:53across the aisle? Did some Democrats jump in too? What does that look like?
01:58Yeah, it was both. I mean, going into this, I think you'd expect to see Democrats dumping the stock
02:04and Republicans buying it. And that really didn't pan out. You know, you saw four,
02:08there were four Democrats who bought Tesla since then, six who sold it, two Republicans who bought
02:15it, and one who sold it. And then some of those Democrats did both buy it and sell it in that
02:19same period of time. In addition to Green, Representative Josh Gothheimer of New Jersey,
02:25Democrat there, he was the most active trader. He made 11 purchases of it. Green had made nine.
02:31Gothheimers were all between $1,000 and $1,000 and $1,000 and $15,000. He also made three sales.
02:36So 14 total transactions there for the New Jersey Democrat.
02:41Talk to us financially. Did these trades pay off for anyone?
02:46It doesn't look to be the case. And again, the problem we have where the disclosures just don't
02:51give us a ton of information. We don't know exactly how much these lawmakers paid per share.
02:57Now, they do have to report the day they made the transaction. So then we can go back and see,
03:02what was the high of that day? What was the low of that day? How is it trading now? And how is it
03:08trading when they sold? So it really didn't pan out all that well for most of them. We also don't
03:15know if the ones who've sold their stock sold all of it or sold part of it for the most part.
03:20So there could be some who are still holding on to it and still might be down right now in paper,
03:25but could end up getting a game whenever they go to sell it.
03:30The intersection of money and politics is really an interesting place to be. Ethics concerns are
03:36always lingering over there. So what are they in this instance?
03:42Yeah, there's a lot to look at here. I mean, you've obviously got the long running concern
03:46of lawmakers being able to trade on knowledge that they alone have, you know, that they're having
03:52some sort of insider trading on this. Now, none of that, there's no evidence that that took place
03:57at all here. Another issue that Delaney McCasso from Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog, brought up
04:03to me, though, is that these lawmakers have the ability to move markets. And we really could see
04:08this with with Marjorie Taylor Greene. We'll get into that in a second. But they can put out press
04:13releases. They can take official actions to benefit a company that they've invested in. And the issue
04:19with Representative Greene, as we've discussed before, is that she is the chair of the Doge
04:24subcommittee in the House. And as an official action in that role, she wrote a letter to DOJ and FBI
04:31asking them to step up investigations into what she called violent attacks on Tesla dealerships.
04:38Now, maybe those investigations are merited. Maybe they're not. But Representative Greene has a
04:45financial incentive to make sure the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships are cleared so people
04:50can go in and buy those cars. So that right there is is a problem that you have with lawmakers,
04:56you know, owning stocks and being able to to take steps that a regular investor would not be able to
05:02take. Yeah, lawmakers have money in the game here on both sides of the aisle. Has anyone responded to
05:09you when you've reached out for comment here? Yeah, so I reached out to offices of all 10 of
05:16the lawmakers. Four of them responded. They all said that the lawmakers do not actively trade their
05:21accounts. They are overseen by financial managers. Doesn't really matter much is what the watchdog told
05:29me and said that, you know, they still know what they own. They have to disclose it. So sure,
05:35maybe it wasn't their choice to buy Tesla. But then they certainly know, oh, they do own Tesla shares.
05:41Now, Representative Greene's office got back to me when I inquired previously and they just said,
05:46you know, it's about domestic terrorism. You're just a Democratic troll, Zach, enough out of you.
05:51So they didn't respond. We don't know for sure whether she's making her own trades or not.
05:55And then the rest of them just didn't get back to us. To your point, I mean, decisions made by lawmakers
06:02really have the ability to move markets here. So what are the rules right now as they relate to
06:08members of Congress holding stock and trading stock? So they can hold and trade. They're just
06:14not supposed to take official actions from which they could benefit financially. And, you know,
06:19that's something you can certainly have a broad interpretation of. And it's also, you know,
06:23OK, great. That's the rule. But who's going to enforce it? And that's that's part of the problem
06:28right now. You know, I don't see anybody really deciding that they would want to look into this
06:33trade from Representative Greene or anybody else's trades for that matter. There just doesn't seem
06:37to be much an appetite for that in Congress from members of either party. Lawmakers from both sides
06:42of the aisle have strong opinions on this. On one hand, some of them, like we're discussing now,
06:48own stock and trade stock. On the other hand, members of both parties have been really critical
06:53of lawmakers participating in this. I know there's some legislation on this. I spoke with Congressman
06:58Tim Burchett on his legislation to ban ban lawmakers from owning and trading stock. I mean,
07:04where is that legislation out right now? So there are two bills that have been filed. There's that
07:10one and another one. And they're both just sitting in committee right now. They don't seem to have
07:13really advanced. And this is this happens every Congress, you know, every Congress, there were bills
07:17filed and then they seem to go nowhere. I think it was two Congresses previously. There was some
07:23action. It sounded like there might be some movement on that. Insider did this whole big spread
07:29on congressional stock trades that seemed to really get a lot of attention. But nothing happened by the
07:34end of the Congress. And we were starting back from scratch bill wise. And here we are again. So,
07:38yeah, we do see energy behind that from people in both parties. We even see that from some of the
07:43people who are trading stocks. You know, Representative Goffheimer's office told me
07:46that he is in favor of lawmakers having to put their shares in blind trusts. You know,
07:51and he's taking steps to put his own in a trust right now, not necessarily blind. But,
07:56you know, you are seeing people pushing for that. It's just a matter of it's not the most important
08:02thing out there. You know, there's a lot of lawmakers who don't want to have this happen either. So I
08:07think it's something we're not going to really see unless a lot of pressure and media attention
08:11starts to bubble up like what we saw a couple of Congresses ago after the insider spread.
08:16Well, I appreciate you tracking this. Zach Everson, thanks so much for joining me.
08:21My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Brittany.