John McGuire bought NVIDIA stock before NVIDIA made a $12.9 billion AI deal

MAGA Congressman John McGuire, Mr. “I Don’t Even Trades,” bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of NVIDIA stock ahead of NVIDIA’s announcement this week that it is buying AI startup Hugging Face.

This is a matter of public record; McGuire filed a disclosure form on Wednesday noting the purchase with the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

The purchase was made on Aug. 18, per the disclosure.

On Thursday, NVIDIA – market cap: $5.55 trillion – announced a $12.9 billion deal to purchase Hugging Face, a New York-based startup that has built a repository for open-source AI models.

Hugging Face was the focus of an intense bidding war given its place in the AI sphere – it has more than 18 million developers and researchers using more than 3 million models, and more than 200,000 enterprise customers.

McGuire would know better than the rest of us just how valuable Hugging Face was on the open market because he serves on House Oversight subcommittees focused on cybersecurity, information technology and military affairs.

Assuming McGuire pays attention to what goes on in the subcommittee meetings, he’s getting access to classified and other sensitive information that the rest of us aren’t privy to, including the latest developments in who wants to buy who – valuable information, if you’re in a position to trade on it, like a congressman would be.

Here’s where I’ll give McGuire some credit: according to data from Quiver Quantitative, McGuire’s net worth has increased his net worth by $390,000 since he announced his candidacy for the Fifth District seat in 2024.

It’s one thing to have access to classified and sensitive information; entirely another thing to take that information straight to the bank.

Of note here: McGuire, oddly, doesn’t seem to want to take credit for using the inside info to better his own personal bottom line.

Asked by a Lynchburg TV station last month about his reluctance to schedule a debate with his Democratic opponent, Tom Perriello, McGuire made the reluctance about Perriello having accused him of “insider trading,” claiming: “I don’t even do trades.”

Instead of patting himself on the back after getting what you could look at as praise from your opponent for having the sense to make money off what you know, McGuire signaled that he expected an apology from Perriello for pointing out the publicly available information about his stock trades.

Weird, right?

Maybe he’s telling us there that he gets it, that it doesn’t look good, after all.

Credit here on the stock trades becoming public knowledge in the first place goes to Cville Right Now, which broke the story on McGuire actually doing trades, reporting back on July 13 that McGuire, after voting with the House majority to pass the 21st Century Road to Housing Act “sold off over $1,000 of BlackRock Inc. stock, partially divesting himself from one of the companies the legislation targets three days before the bill became law,” and “also divulged purchasing between $1,001 and $15,000 in Space Explorations Technologies Corp., the company founded by Elon Musk in 2002.”

That information comes from a public disclosure form on file with the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives – filed by McGuire, with his signature.

The BlackRock Inc. stock dump was dated July 7; the SpaceX dump was dated June 15.

Here’s where I added to the reporting done last month by CRN: Mr. “I Don’t Even Do Trades”  dumped more BlackRock stock – in separate trades valued between $1,001 and $15,000 – on July 10 and July 14, per a filing made with the clerk’s office on Aug. 7.

That Aug. 7 filing also includes a notation of a sale of between $1,001 and $15,000 in stock of Applied Materials Inc., a Silicon Valley company – market cap: $360.9 billion – that supplies equipment, services and software for the manufacture of semiconductor chips for electronics, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones, televisions, and solar products.

One other from the Aug. 7 filing: the sale of between $1,001 and $15,000 of stock in Palo Alto Networks Inc., another Silicon Valley company – market cap: $271.6 billion – that focuses on cybersecurity, with its core product being a platform that includes advanced firewalls and cloud-based offerings that extend those firewalls to cover other aspects of security.

You’d think he’d be proud of himself for all of this.

The guy is $390,000 better off because he “does trades.”

Me, personally, I’d be bragging about that.