Trump’s sharemarket bonanza and the billionaire bros club

You don’t need to look far to see who gained from the market frenzy after US President Donald Trump delayed the most destructive aspects of his tariff regime.

We use the term “gained” very narrowly, of course, given that, aside from the overnight market spike, global investors are still sporting multitrillion-dollar losses from Trump’s bludgeoning tariffs.

Donald Trump’s radical plan got a reality check from bond markets.Credit: AP

But let’s ignore that for now.

The astounding point is that more than 9 million Trump followers on his Truth Social media platform got the drop that something big was going to happen on Wednesday morning US time. “This is a great time to buy!!! DJT,” he posted.

Hours later, the tariff reversal delivered a $US4 trillion Wall Street windfall that is now cascading around the globe.

His followers, whom we can assume include MAGA faithful, billionaires, finance industry insiders and any world leader who intends to keep their job, had effectively got the inside word that Trump was about to perform a spectacular – and lucrative – backflip.

And few benefited more than Trump himself.

The fact that the whole exercise played out on Truth Social underlined its mantle as one of the most consequential media platforms the world has ever seen, and ensured its owner, Trump Media, was among the biggest beneficiaries of the market frenzy that followed.

It soared more than 22 per cent – twice the broader market rally – and added more than $US400 million ($647 million) to the value of Trump’s 53 per cent stake in the platform.

The US president might not have minded the fact that his svengali, Elon Musk, did slightly better, with Tesla soaring nearly 23 per cent in the aftermath.

The billionaire bros club which has congealed around Trump since his election last year were massive beneficiaries. Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg added $US62 billion alone.

Members of Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index added more than $US300 billion to their fortunes in US trading on Wednesday.

The timing of the post, and Trump’s announcement hours later, posed a prickly question for White House watchers.

Did we just watch a multitrillion-dollar insider trading scam play out in public before an audience of millions who almost certainly include the most powerful individuals across business and politics globally?

The message from the great man himself, when asked, was not exactly a categorical denial.

“Fairly early this morning,” was as much clarity as Trump offered when asked directly whether he made his tariff decision before, or after, his Truth Social post. A White House spokesman, in comments to The Washington Post, pushed back against the idea the post could have manipulated the markets, saying it was the president’s responsibility to reassure the markets.

His political opponents were not beating around the bush.

“The president of the United States is literally engaging in the world’s biggest market manipulation scheme,” the Democrats from the House Committee on Financial Services posted on Musk’s X on Wednesday afternoon.

Whatever the answer, the sobering truth for the billionaires who kissed the ring and collectively poured hundreds of millions into Trump’s election campaign and inauguration, and who parroted his policies, is that their financial pain counted for nought when it came to the US president’s change of heart.

While media reports make clear that insiders such as Musk were heavily lobbying the White House over the disaster that would befall his business if the tariffs went ahead as planned, it was Trump’s new north star – the bond market – that persuaded the US president to change tack.

As Treasury Secretary Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent has impressed on Trump, it is long-term bond prices – not the skittish sharemarket – that lays the groundwork for the audacious transformation of the US economy that Trump wants to engineer.

While sharemarket investors were worrying about their stocks, a far more alarming scenario was playing out in the US bond market, which is the bedrock of share prices and mortgage rates globally, and signalled we may have been on the cusp of a financial crisis.

This was not the normal case of so-called “bond vigilantes” signalling their displeasure with a government’s policies by selling bonds and sending interest rates higher.

There were clear signs that market participants were being forced into panic-selling to cover losses, and the global financial crisis offers a clear example of where that leads.

As Trump admitted this morning, this is why he blinked.

“The bond market is very tricky. I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it’s beautiful, the bond market right now. But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”

The question now is whether the bond market managed to change tack in time, or if there is more chaos ahead.

The Market Recap newsletter is a wrap of the day’s trading. Get it each weekday afternoon.