Former President Donald Trump claims to be a canny investor and businessman. However, his tax returns show that he sold stock in Apple and Microsoft far too early, missing out on millions of dollars.
According to his 2017 tax return, Trump and his wife Melania sold stock in six companies in early 2017, including the tech giants Apple and Microsoft.
As the charts below show, post-2017 both tech stocks rose sharply and peaked in 2021-22. Although both companies have seen their valuation fall recently, both are still far above the price that the Trumps sold at.
Both tech stocks were bought by the Trumps in October 2013, and both gained significantly. The Apple stock was bought for $481,505 and was sold for $833,118, making $351,613, a gain of 73 percent. The Microsoft stock was bought for $248,867, sold in 2017 for $464,558, and made the Trumps $215,691, an 87 percent gain.
However, if they had held on, both shareholdings would have been vastly higher.
An investment of $481,500 in Apple stock in 2013 would now be worth $4,150,000, making a total profit of $3,669,000. If Trump had held his Microsoft shares, they would now be worth just under $2 million.
Selling today, the Trumps would have made a return of over $5 million.
This doesn’t factor in the peak prices of both stocks. The Trumps could have sold the Apple shares for around $5.1 million in early January 2022, and the Microsoft shares for $2.5 million in November 2021, making a potential gain of over $7 million once dividends are factored in.
Getty Images
Trump tax returns
The House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee released six years of the former president’s tax returns at the end of 2022, prompting further dissection of Trump’s financial affairs. The tax returns showed that Joe Biden had paid $4.1 million more in federal taxes over the six-year period than Trump had, while the records showed Trump held several foreign bank accounts during his time in the White House.
In a statement sent to Newsweek and published on his campaign website, Trump warned that House Democrats “should have never” publicized the tax records and that the U.S. Supreme Court “should have never approved it.”
The statement continued: “The ‘Trump’ tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been”.
The 2017 document (in the bundle ‘attachment E’, file Form 1040 2017-1.pdf), a joint individual tax return for Donald Trump and Melania Trump, shows that the Trumps sold shareholdings in seven companies, most of which were bought sometime in 2013 and sold in 2017.
The net gain from the shares over those 4 years was a fairly impressive $642,000, from an initial investment of $1.36 million, a return of 47 percent. As a comparison, the S&P 500 rose around 32 percent over the same period.
Trump claimed in 2014 that he sold his Apple holdings, saying on Twitter that:
“I predicted Apple’s stock fall based on their dumb refusal to give the option of a larger iPhone screen like Samsung. I sold my Apple stock”
I predicted Apple’s stock fall based on their dumb refusal to give the option of a larger iPhone screen like Samsung. I sold my Apple stock
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2014
However, there is no evidence of any sale of Apple stock in 2014 in the tax returns released by the committee. The 2017 tax return shows that the Trumps didn’t sell until January 2017.
The tech news website CNET reported in 2016 that Trump owned “millions” in Apple stock, according to a financial disclosure document that Trump released before the 2016 election. However, that document shows his Apple holdings to be between $500,000 and $1 million in value, which tallies with the 2017 tax return.
Newsweek contacted the Trump office for comment, but received no reply by time of publication.
