Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has received widespread scrutiny over her husband’s stock purchases, is making bank on another well-timed bet on a familiar corporation.
The California Democrat’s husband, Paul, who owns a San Francisco investment and consulting firm, scooped up between $1 million and $5 million worth of call options in computer chip company Nvidia on Nov. 22. Pelosi, however, held off on reporting the transaction until right before Christmas.
Nvidia is not new to the Pelosis. In 2022, Paul grabbed more than $1 million in Nvidia call options — which give investors the right to buy shares of a company at a specific price — just weeks before a congressional vote on providing massive subsidies to the chip manufacturing industry. He sold them after she received criticism over their timing.
At the time, Pelosi said that her husband had never made stock purchases based on information she had given him when pressed by Fox News Digital. Her office also distanced her from Paul’s financial decisions.
“The Speaker does not own any stocks,” Pelosi’s communications director told FOX Business in 2022. “The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.”
But long after the storm had calmed, Paul re-invested in the company, with the most recent contract from late last year. The company’s stock has since taken off.
In early January, Nvidia announced mass production of slower AI chips to be sold to China that complied with U.S. export rules. Weeks later, the U.S. government announced Nvidia would be one of several companies they would partner with on an AI research program, Yahoo Finance reported.
Christopher Josephs, co-founder of Autopilot, an app that allows individuals to track and copy a politician’s trades, told Fox News Digital he estimates the most recent Pelosi investment to be around $2.5 million and said the shares are up over 50% in just three months, netting them roughly $1.25 million.
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Pelosi’s office did not respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.
The former House speaker had previously grabbed attention over her husband’s stock timing. Lawmakers’ spouses can trade in companies or industries their partner may help regulate, but it’s illegal for family members and members of Congress to profit from inside information.
Paul cashed in on Big Tech shortly before the House Judiciary Committee voted to curtail the “unregulated power” of companies like Google and Amazon in 2021, Fortune reported. The move wasn’t considered a threat to the companies, and the tech firms’ stock prices continued to rise.
Paul purchased 4,000 shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, by exercising call options a week before the vote. The call options allowed him to snag the shares of Alphabet at $1,200 a piece as they closed that day at just over $2,500, according to Fortune. Paul earned $5.3 million on the investment.
A few months before the Alphabet purchase, Paul picked up millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock days before the company announced a lucrative government contract.
Paul exercised call options and paid $1.95 million to buy 15,000 shares of Microsoft at a strike price of $130 on March 19, FOX Business reported. That same day, Paul paid $1.4 million for 10,000 shares valued at $140.
Microsoft announced a government contract worth nearly $22 billion to supply U.S. Army combat troops with augmented reality headsets just 12 days after Paul’s purchase, and the company’s share prices increased from about $230 to roughly $255 — or close to 11% — in the weeks following the announcement.
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And months before the Microsoft purchase, Paul grabbed between $500,000 and $1 million in Tesla investments in December 2020, roughly a month before President Biden announced the federal government would transition its fleet to electric vehicles.
Biden, who was open about moving toward electric vehicles, in late January 2021 “directed federal officials to devise a plan for converting all federal, state, local and tribal fleets, including 225,000 Postal Service vehicles, to ‘clean and zero-emission vehicles,’” The Washington Post first reported at the time.
Biden’s infrastructure plan later set aside more than $170 billion for electric vehicle subsidies.
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