President Donald Trump bought millions of dollars of stock in drug companies, defense contractors, and tech firms during the first three months of this year, according to new financial disclosures released this week. It’s astounding to watch a sitting president profit in such a nakedly corrupt way. But there is one potentially funny trade in the new disclosure.
Trump purchased somewhere between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Kura Sushi, the conveyor belt sushi chain, on Feb. 2. These financial disclosure forms don’t give a precise number and allow ranges to be listed, showing as much as $100 million in trades, according to the Associated Press.
The purchase stuck out to people online, who have started to speculate that maybe it wasn’t an accident. After all, the Trump regime isn’t known for its attention to detail. Remember when Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference at a business called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in 2020? Obviously, Rudy’s people were confused and had been given instructions to book the Four Seasons hotel.
Some people are speculating that perhaps Trump (and the people managing his investment portfolio) intended to buy something like FujiKura, an electrical equipment company that also makes golf equipment, or Kura Oncology, which develops cancer treatments and has the stock ticker KURA. Kura Oncology’s stock is currently up 9% on the day, perhaps because so many people online are speculating about Trump’s odd stock purchase. FujiKura is down 8% on the day, but that slide kicked off yesterday after a three-year forecast dashed investors’ hopes.
The Kura Sushi stock purchase sticks out among Trump’s other trades, which include the tobacco company Philip Morris, the private prison company GEO Group, the bodycam company Axon, and all of the major tech firms, including Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, among a host of others. Trump has also invested in defense contractors like RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, and Palantir. Trump has become very cozy with the leaders of all of these big tech giants, going so far as to draft them as a sort of shadow cabinet to accompany him on his recent trip to China.
That said, there are some restaurant groups in the stocks that Trump bought. Trump purchased Cheesecake Factory stock worth $15,001-$50,000 on March 4 and Dave & Buster’s stock worth $15,001-$50,000 on Feb. 26. Maybe Trump is just a big fan of skee-ball.
The thing that makes Trump’s purchase of Kura Sushi particularly weird is that it’s among his largest purchases, in that $1-5 million range. There are 36 companies in that range, which is a small number relative to the 3,600 buy and sell orders he placed in the first three months of this year. His other purchases in the millions include huge companies like Boeing, Oracle, and Apple.
Kura Sushi has 91 locations in the U.S., according to its website, with the most in California (27), Texas (16), and New Jersey (7). The restaurant chain has 14 locations listed as “opening soon” on its website and plans to expand to 300 locations, according to Nikkei Asia.
Trump’s stock trading has gotten attention because the president has endorsed various companies right around the same time that he purchased their stock. Journalist Judd Legum compared Trump’s public comments on various companies and his stock purchases, finding some curious timing, like on March 25, when Trump bought Micron and then went on Fox News the following day to call it “one of the hottest companies.”
Trump did something similar on Feb. 10, buying between $1-5 million in Dell stock. On Feb. 19, he told an audience to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”
1. What I found in Trump’s new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn’t look good.
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) May 18, 2026 at 6:58 AM
It’s entirely possible that the Kura purchase was intentional, and he’s just buying random stock or knows someone at the company and has insider information. Among his more odd purchases, Trump bought stock in Versant Media Group worth $15,001-$50,000 on March 4. Versant is the new company formed as a spin-off of Comcast, which includes CNBC, USA Network, and the Golf Channel. Versant also owns MSNBC, the liberal cable channel.
You read that right. Trump owns a relatively large piece of the “fake news” that he whines about all day.
