On Feb. 10, an AI founder named Matt Shumer published a 5,000-word essay arguing that most of the world was sleepwalking into a crisis akin to coronavirus, but only tech people knew what was coming. The essay would be viewed nearly 87 million times and crystallized a fear that would engulf Wall Street by the end of the month: AI wasn’t just a boom story. The technology could hollow out entire industries like software engineering, which had been investors’ golden child.
The day Shumer published the essay, Wall Street didn’t panic. Instead, the Dow closed at a record. But for one brokerage account, something big was happening indeed.
The account in question is held in the name of President Donald Trump. According to a spokesperson from the Trump Organization, the Trump family’s privately held conglomerate, the accounts are operated by third-party financial institutions, which have “sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” Trades, the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Fortune, are executed through “automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization play “any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”
