Hundreds of thousands of dollars were invested in Eli Lilly on Donald Trump’s behalf earlier this year, according to financial disclosures, as the US drugmaker benefited from his administration’s move to expand access to blockbuster obesity treatments.
Ethics filings revealed several thousand trades on the US president’s behalf tied to stocks and bonds in the first quarter of 2026, with a cumulative value of between $220m and about $750m.
The forms, released last week, included securities linked to some of the largest companies in the US, including Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Nvidia.
Trump has built strong ties with Corporate America since his return to office in January 2025, and just last week took a string of CEOs – including those of Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs and Nvidia – with him on a state visit to China.
The Trump Organization has denied the president “plays any role” in selecting the stocks in his investment portfolio.
Among the trades made on Trump’s behalf were seven acquisitions of shares in Eli Lilly worth up to $680,000 between 6 January and the end of March, while federal agencies rolled out some initiatives that benefited the drugmakers’s weight-loss drugs.
KFF Health News, which highlighted the transactions, noted that during and just after the same time period several US government actions under Trump benefited Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 business.
This includes a pilot program in which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will expand access to GLP-1 medications, including Lilly’s Foundayo and Zepbound KwikPen, for Medicare patients.
And in February, KFF Health News noted, the administration unveiled TrumpRx: its direct-to-consumer drug sales website, aimed at lowering prescription drug costs.
According to a White House fact sheet, for the first few months TrumpRx featured medications made by the first five manufacturers that struck pricing deals with the administration – including Eli Lilly – and pointed patients to LillyDirect, the drug company’s telemedicine service. (The White House announced an expansion of TrumpRx earlier this week, and said it would now feature more than 600 generic medications.)
Eli Lilly, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the White House, and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization told Reuters in a statement last week that Trump’s “investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions”.
“Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” they added.
The spokesperson also said that “neither President Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments. They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind.”
The Financial Times reported that the number of transactions disclosed last week “far exceeds” Trump’s trading activity during the first year of his second term.
The filings come as Trump and his family have faced scrutiny over the last year over their growing wealth, including from recent real estate and cryptocurrency ventures, and other business investments, while many Americans continue to feel financial strain, with US inflation remaining high and fuel costs still climbing.
Days before the trading disclosures were released, Trump was asked whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal to end the war in Iran. He responded: “Not even a little bit.”
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said. “I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”