Trump's Dell praise lifts stock—but ethics lawyer says presidents shouldn't pick winners

Michael Dell has cultivated relationships with sitting presidents for years, serving on advisory councils under George W. Bush and meeting with Barack Obama on trade and technology policy. His recent proximity to Trump, however, has taken a more explicit and public form. Beyond Dell's $6.25 billion（約1兆円） pledge to Trump Accounts (a philanthropic investment described as bipartisan), Trump has begun endorsing Dell directly from positions of presidential authority—the Oval Office, White House events, and the stock market opening. Analyst Patrick Moorhead contends this is noise: Dell's business case stands on its own, driven by hyperscalers (large cloud providers) purchasing AI servers at scale. Dell's May 29 earnings—reporting $24.4 billion（約3.9兆円） in AI orders and raising full-year AI server revenue guidance to roughly $60 billion（約9.6兆円）—support that view. Yet Richard Painter's concern is structural, not about Dell's fundamentals. He argues that when a sitting president publicly endorses a company, investors may reasonably infer inside knowledge of federal contracts or government favor, creating a market-moving signal that presidents are forbidden from sending under long-standing ethics rules. The three same-day stock moves following Trump's statements suggest such inference may already be occurring, regardless of whether Trump's praise caused the moves or merely coincided with them.