President Donald Trump’s managed investment accounts sold Palantir Technologies and bought Western Digital in the first quarter, according to a recent ethics disclosure. Key Points: Trump’s i
President Donald Trump’s managed investment accounts sold Palantir Technologies and bought Western Digital in the first quarter, according to a recent ethics disclosure.
- Trump’s investment accounts made 3,642 stock trades in the first quarter.
- The accounts sold $854,000 to $4.6 million in Palantir and bought $45,000 to $150,000 in Western Digital.
- The accounts are managed by third-party institutions, not by Trump himself.
The disclosure from the U.S. Office of Government Ethicsshowed heavy trading across Trump’s managed accounts during the first quarter.
The accounts sold between $854,000 and $4.6 million in Palantir, a software company that serves commercial customers and government agencies.
Palantir sells data integration and analytics tools, and its artificial intelligence platform connects business data to large language models so users can analyze information and automate tasks through natural language.
The company’s system is built around an ontology, which links digital data to real-world objects and creates a structure for operational decisions.
Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, told CNBC that corporate executives remain uneasy about products from AI labs such as Anthropic because of data security concerns.
He said Palantir’s ontology-based approach can make large language models “safe, useful, and precise.”
Palantir reported first-quarter revenue of $1.6 billion, up 85%, while non-GAAP earnings rose 153% to 33 cents per diluted share.
Karp said the results showed strength that “dwarfs the performance of essentially every software company in history at this scale.”
Even after falling 38% from its high, Palantir traded at 140 times adjusted earnings, leaving the stock expensive against expected annual earnings growth of 57% through 2027.
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The same accounts bought between $45,000 and $150,000 in Western Digital, whose stock has climbed 2,100% since Jan. 2023.
Western Digital makes hard disk drives for data centers, personal computers and consumer devices.
Hard disk drives are slower and less power efficient than solid-state drives, but they cost about one-sixth as much per unit of stored data.
That cost advantage matters in AI, where frequently accessed data may sit on solid-state drives while less active data can remain on cheaper hard disk drives.
Western Digital led the hard disk drive market last year with a 47% shipment share, ahead of Seagate at 42% and Toshiba at 11%.
The company expects data center hard disk drive sales to grow 22% annually through 2028.
Western Digital reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $3.3 billion, up 45%, and non-GAAP earnings of $2.72 per diluted share, up 97%.
CEO Irving Tan said AI workloads from training to inference create data that must be stored “persistently and cost-efficiently” on hard disk drives.
Amit Daryanani of Evercore said this cycle may differ from past hard disk drive booms because Western Digital and Seagate are avoiding new capacity. That matters because the hard disk drive business has often swung between shortages and gluts, with excess supply driving prices lower after demand peaks.
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