House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is alleged by some to have improperly benefited from the prolific and quite lucrative stock trades of her venture capitalist husband, Paul Pelosi, amid suspicion that their great wealth has been obtained through trading on insider knowledge.
Such suspicions were only bolstered in recent days after it was revealed that Paul Pelosi had just purchased stock shares in Tesla that almost immediately surged in value, The Daily Caller reported.
The purchase comes amid the ongoing push for “green energy” by the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, which includes encouragement and incentives for electric vehicles of the sort that Tesla manufactures.
A rather lucrative transaction
It was Forbes that first reported Tuesday on the Pelosi purchase of Tesla stock after it had been revealed in a required disclosure report Monday by Speaker Pelosi.
That disclosure noted that Pelosi had exercised 25 call options, or 2,500 shares, of Tesla stock at a strike price of $500 per share on March 17.
A separate disclosure filing in January revealed that the Tesla options had been initially set on Dec. 22, 2021, at the locked-in price of $500 per share.
That is important because, according to The Daily Caller, Tesla shares were trading at $872 per share on the day Pelosi obtained them at the discounted rate of $500, making the total value of the shares about $2.18 million.
The value of Tesla shares surged dramatically within days after that to about $1,036 per share, meaning Pelosi’s shares increased by roughly half a million dollars to a total value of around $2.6 million.
Allegations of insider trading
Business Insider reported that Speaker Pelosi has come under fire for alleged insider trading by herself — or more accurately her husband — along with other members of Congress and their staffers, particularly concerning Pelosi’s initial dismissal of concerns over insider trading and demands to ban members and their spouses from being allowed to trade in individual stocks.
She has since changed her tune and signaled support for a ban if Congress puts forward such legislation, but that hasn’t stopped her husband from continuing to make exceptionally timely and lucrative trades of his own over the past few months.
The New York Post reported that Speaker Pelosi’s office has not commented on the revelations in those recent disclosures, but Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill did issue a statement in January seeking to distance his boss from her husband’s financial activities when the issue of alleged insider trading had previously been raised.
“The Speaker does not own any stocks,” Hammill said at the time. “As you can see from the required disclosures, with which the Speaker fully cooperates, these transactions are marked ‘SP’ for Spouse. The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.”