The husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) placed a bet of up to $6 million on Big Tech companies in the weeks leading to a House Judiciary Committee’s vote on legislation targeting some of those corporations.
The story: In a financial disclosure signed by Nancy Pelosi earlier this month on July 2, her husband, Paul Pelosi, reported winning on stock and betting on popular big tech companies such as Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Apple Inc.
In detail: Paul Pelosi purchased 50 call options for Apple with a strike price of $100, expiring on June 17, 2022, and bet on Amazon, buying 20 call options with a strike price of $3,000 that have the same expiration date.
On June 18, he exercised his Alphabet call options to acquire 4,000 shares at a strike price of $1,200. The trade netted Paul Pelosi a $4.8 million gain, which has since jumped to $5.3 million.
Why it matters? Paul Pelosi bought the shares for Apple Inc. a week before the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance six bipartisan antitrust bills. Four of those bills target Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
Pelosi has said he supports the legislation.
“There has been concern on both sides of the aisle about the consolidation of power of the tech companies,” Pelosi said last month. “This legislation is an attempt to address that in the interest of fairness, in the interest of competition, in interest of meeting the needs of people who are – whose privacy, whose data and all the rest is at the mercy of these tech companies.”
Former Rep. Jill Long Thompson (D-IN) said he does not believe that Pelosi’s husband violated the STOCK Act, noting that information about the legislation is available to the public. Regardless of his marriage to the House Speaker, Paul Pelosi is unlikely to “have any information that someone else wouldn’t,” Thompson said, according to Fox Business.
“Members of Congress make it clear what their positions are on these issues and the fact that they’re working on a piece of legislation that would be public information,” Thompson added.
Pelosi’s response: “The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions. The speaker does not own any stock,” a spokesperson for Pelosi said.
Scroll down to leave a comment and share your thoughts.
