A nearly six-month old video of Donald Trump praising International Business Machines’ (IBM) chief executive officer sent the shares surging as much as 10 per cent on June 1 to a record high, adding more than US$28 billion (S$35.8 billion) to the company’s stock market value. When the US President initially praised IBM’s Arvind Krishna as a “legend” at the December 2025 White House event, there was little immediate market reaction. But over the weekend, dozens of accounts on social media platform X recirculated the video, with one post on May 30 from Polymarket Money alone racking up more than 700,000 views.By the night of May 31, trading on Robinhood Markets’s 24 Hour Market showed that IBM stock was climbing – even before Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s comments boosted software shares – setting the stage for the sharp rise this morning. The movement underscores the scale of the speculative mania that is sweeping through corners of the market as the artificial-intelligence boom fuels a stampede into tech stocks.In this case, it also reflects Trump’s willingness to champion particular companies and industries, which has sometimes caused his comments to set off sharp stock moves.“It’s not hard. Invest in what Trump talks about, make money, rinse and repeat,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management.Even though the comments about IBM were months old, he added, it “doesn’t take much these days to get the animal spirits flowing”.Intel shares swung in August 2025 on Trump’s comments about its chief executive. Dell Technologies more recently popped after the President praised founder Michael Dell for contributing to his Trump investment accounts for children and urged Americans to buy the company’s computers.And Trump’s social media pronouncements about the war in Iran have moved the market more broadly. IBM shares had already been rising sharply along with other tech stocks. By the end of last week, they had surged nearly 40 per cent in a little over two weeks. Some of those gains came after the Trump administration agreed to award US$1 billion to the company to build a foundry for making quantum computing chips, a deal that set the government up to receive a minority equity stake.It is unclear why the old Trump video gained ground on social media over the weekend and Polymarket did not return a request for comment.On June 1, the stock jumped as much as 10 per cent and largely held the gain, with the shares up about 9.7 per cent by early afternoon. Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co, said the move reflects how intensely traders are piling into market winners.“Whenever a stock gains some strong upside momentum in today’s markets, the momentum-based algos turbocharge that move,” he said. After the stock broke a resistance level last week, he said, traders “were looking for reasons to take it even higher”. BLOOMBERG