Paul Pelosi bets up to $6M on Big Tech before powerful House committee passes sweeping antitrust measures
The transactions were disclosed in a filing on Friday, July 2
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband placed a bet of up to $6 million on Apple, Amazon and Google-parent company Alphabet ahead of a powerful House committee moving forward with bills aimed at reining in the powers of Big Tech.
Paul Pelosi on May 21 spent up to $250,000 on 50 Apple calls that have a strike price of $100 and that expire on June 17, 2022. He also bought 20 Amazon calls, costing up to $1 million, that have a strike price of $3,000 and that also expire on June 17, 2022.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | APPLE INC. | 239.59 | +2.26 | +0.95% |
| AMZN | AMAZON.COM INC. | 210.71 | +2.82 | +1.36% |
| GOOGL | ALPHABET INC. | 171.49 | +2.54 | +1.50% |
On June 18, Paul Pelosi, exercised his Alphabet call options giving him the right to buy 4,000 shares at a price of $1,200 apiece, or $4.8 million. The Alphabet call options were originally purchased on Feb. 27, 2020.
The transactions were disclosed in a filing on Friday, July 2.
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Paul Pelosi did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for comment.
"The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions," a spokesperson for Pelosi’s office told FOX Business. "The speaker does not own any stock."
Paul Pelosi, who runs a real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm, did not violate the STOCK Act unless he acted on nonpublic information, which seems unlikely, according to former Rep. Jill Long Thompson, D-Ind.
Even though Paul Pelosi is married to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., it is unlikely that he would "have any information that someone else wouldn't," she said. "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."
The House Judiciary Committee on June 11 advanced a series of bills with bipartisan support that would limit the powers of tech giants, including Apple, Amazon, Google and others.
The bills, which passed through the committee by slim margins, have not yet been voted on by the entire House of Representatives.
Speaker Pelosi has expressed support for the legislation.
"There has been concern on both sides of the aisle about the consolidation of power of the tech companies," Pelosi said at a press conference on June 24. "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."
This is not the first time that investments made by Paul Pelosi have been made in close proximity to happenings in Congress.
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Paul Pelosi in March exercised $1.95 million worth of Microsoft call options less than two weeks before the tech stalwart secured a $22 billion contract to supply U.S. Army combat troops with augmented reality headsets.
In January, he purchased up to $1 million of Tesla calls before the Biden administration delivered its plans to provide incentives to promote the shift away from traditional automobiles and toward electric vehicles.