Trump Bought Palantir Stock Seven Times Before Hyping It on Truth Social, Filings Show

New financial disclosures from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show President Donald Trump made at least seven separate purchases of Palantir Technologies stock during March 2026, totaling up to $530,000, before publicly praising the AI defense contractor on Truth Social in a week when its share price was sliding on Iran-related volatility. The records, first reported by CNBC on May 15 and amplified by Yahoo News and Rolling Out, have reignited a debate over presidential trading rules.

According to the disclosures, Trump's first-quarter activity went well beyond Palantir. He executed roughly 3,700 individual transactions between January and March, including purchases of more than $1 million each in Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. Several of the Palantir trades were marked as unsolicited, meaning they were not made on the recommendation of a broker. Trump also sold as much as $5 million in Palantir stock on February 10, illustrating a level of portfolio reshuffling unusual for a sitting president.

Trump's holdings are managed through fully discretionary accounts overseen by third-party financial institutions, a structure his team has long pointed to as a firewall against allegations of self-dealing. Ethics specialists note that discretionary management does not legally bar a president from commenting publicly on companies he holds, but it has historically been treated as a reason to avoid doing so.

The Palantir disclosures land in a particularly sensitive moment for the company. Palantir has expanded its federal footprint significantly under the second Trump administration, with new and expanded contracts touching immigration enforcement, defense logistics, and intelligence analysis. Critics argue that direct presidential praise of a major federal contractor, by an executive who owns shares in it, creates an appearance problem regardless of who placed the trades.

Disclosure rules give wide ranges rather than exact figures, which makes precise quantification of any potential conflict difficult. The total value of Trump's Palantir position in the first quarter is reported as falling between $247,008 and $630,000.

So far, no congressional committee has moved to formally investigate the trades, but several Democratic lawmakers have called for a presidential trading ban modeled on existing proposals for members of Congress. Whether any of those proposals gain traction in a Republican-controlled Congress remains unlikely in the near term.