Author: Jialiu, Zhangsheng Beatz
A PANews article says Donald Trump is trying to turn the United States into something closer to a fund, using public power to secure stakes in companies while pushing more households into the stock market through newborn investment accounts.
The piece opens with Trump remotely ringing the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq opening bells from the Oval Office shortly before the market opened last Monday. According to the article, he said the accounts would grow with the U.S. economy and that $800 million in new capital would go into the stock market for American children in that week alone.
That session marked the first trading day for the “Trump Account.” PANews said that two days earlier, on July 4, the 250th anniversary of the United States, Trump rolled out an investment account for newborns bearing his name. Each account starts with $1,000 and automatically buys U.S. stocks. The article says 6 million children had already registered before launch.
At the same time, the Treasury was dealing with another number: $39 trillion in national debt. The article says interest expense alone is set to top $1 trillion in fiscal 2026, with an average daily figure of $170 million, forcing the Treasury to keep finding room to service past obligations.
Debt pressure and a push to build the government’s asset side
The article groups three moves from the past 18 months under one idea: direct government ownership in companies, investment accounts for newborns, and efforts to secure equity in AI firms. In its telling, all three are aimed at tying Wall Street more closely to America’s national trajectory.
PANews says total U.S. debt exceeded $39 trillion in May 2026 and was nearing $40 trillion. It puts the debt-to-GDP ratio at about 123%, says debt was rising by roughly $5 billion a day, and cites the Congressional Budget Office as projecting interest payments above $1 trillion in fiscal 2026, or nearly 14% of federal spending. The piece also says the federal government spends $1.33 for every $1 it takes in, while Huatai Securities estimated a fiscal 2026 deficit of as much as $2.2 trillion and a deficit ratio of 7%.
The article lists three traditional responses to debt pressure: higher taxes, spending cuts, and inflation that erodes the real burden of debt. It argues the first two would be politically costly ahead of midterm elections, while the third would require help from the Federal Reserve through rate cuts. The piece says Jerome Powell did not yield to Trump’s pressure and that Warsh would also face difficulty cutting rates under then-current economic conditions.
From there, PANews presents Trump’s answer in balance-sheet terms. If the liability side cannot easily move, expand the asset side instead. In the article’s framing, the U.S. government’s liabilities are clearly visible, but its assets are harder to price in market terms. Trump’s method, it says, is to use subsidies, appropriations, procurement, export controls and regulatory authority as bargaining chips to obtain discounted equity in major companies.
Intel as the template
The first major example in the article is Intel. On Aug. 22, 2025, the U.S. government announced it would acquire a 9.9% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion, or $20.47 a share, becoming the chipmaker’s largest single shareholder.
PANews says the structure mattered as much as the size. Of the $8.9 billion, $5.7 billion came from subsidies Intel was already set to receive under the 2022 CHIPS Act, and another $3.2 billion came from federal funding tied to a secure chips program. In the article’s wording, the government did not put up fresh money. It exchanged what would otherwise have been grants for equity.
Trump later wrote on Truth Social, in all caps according to the piece: “I paid zero dollars for Intel, it’s worth about $11 billion, all belonging to America.”
The article says Trump also described his talks with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in public, saying Intel agreed too quickly and that he “should have asked for more.” When critics attacked the idea of the state taking stakes in private companies, Trump answered, “It’s not shameful, it’s business.” Asked whether government ownership could become routine, he replied, “Aren’t tariffs?”
White House economic adviser Hassett gave the transaction a label of his own, calling it “the down payment on a sovereign wealth fund.” PANews notes that sovereign wealth funds use public money as long-term capital, with Singapore and Abu Dhabi as examples, while the U.S. has never had a comparable fund. Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 directing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Bessent to produce a plan within 90 days, but the broader sovereign wealth fund proposal stalled because of legal, funding and political obstacles.
Even so, the Intel deal, in the article’s view, showed that the shell may not have been built, but the underlying investment logic was already in motion.
More than 20 companies pulled into the model
PANews says the Intel position quickly looked successful on paper. After the transaction, Intel shares rose more than 50%, and by early 2026 the government’s holding had reached a paper value of between $35 billion and $63 billion. The article presents that as a subsidy transformed into tens of billions of dollars in unrealized gains.
From there, the approach spread fast. The article lists a series of transactions and arrangements:
- The Defense Department took a 15% stake in MP Materials, becoming the largest shareholder in the company with full rare earth mining and processing capability at Mountain Pass, California.
- Lithium Americas, a startup developing a lithium project in Nevada and not yet generating revenue at the time, gave up 10% as part of a restructuring tied to a $2.26 billion federal loan.
- Trilogy Metals, a Canadian-listed miner developing copper and zinc assets in Alaska, handed over 10% plus warrants covering 7.5% in exchange for a $35.6 million investment.
- U.S. Steel, during its acquisition by Japan’s Nippon Steel, granted the White House a veto-bearing “golden share,” allowing the president to block plant closures, headquarters relocations or offshore transfers of production.
- L3Harris’s rocket engine business exchanged equity for a $1 billion arrangement.
- NVIDIA and AMD did not surrender equity, but agreed to share 15% of revenue from chip sales to China.
- By late January 2026, USA Rare Earth had also joined the list.
The article cites the Cato Institute as saying the administration has obtained equity, warrants or golden shares in more than 20 companies.
In May 2026, PANews says, the model was extended in batch form to quantum computing. The government announced $2 billion in investments across nine quantum companies in exchange for stakes. IBM received $1 billion, while GlobalFoundries, D-Wave, Rigetti, Infleqtion and others split the rest. The same day, Infleqtion jumped more than 33%, D-Wave rose 33%, Rigetti gained 30%, and IonQ, which was not on the list, climbed 12%. Lutnick said in a statement that the Trump administration was leading the world into a new era of American innovation.
The article adds that traders on Prediction Market are now watching who might be next. The current probabilities it cites are 32% for IonQ, 31% for defense AI firm Anduril Industries, and 28% for Micron.
OpenAI’s 5% proposal
AI is the other major arena in the PANews narrative. Citing NOTUS and the Financial Times, the article says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated the idea of government ownership in major AI companies as early as the start of 2025 and kept discussing it with senior officials afterward.
By early June 2026, those talks had become public. By early July, the article says, numbers had started circulating: OpenAI proposed handing the government a 5% stake. Based on the company’s reported $852 billion valuation after its record March financing round, that stake would be worth about $42.6 billion.
PANews says Altman’s full proposal goes beyond OpenAI. It would have every leading U.S. AI company give 5% to a government platform vehicle. The potential list includes Anthropic as well as Google, Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI. The payout model would mirror the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes public investment income to residents.
The article quotes venture investor Chamath, one of the hosts of the All-In podcast, as saying that AI economics are very different from internet economics. Adding users in the internet era cost almost nothing at the margin; in AI, each additional user needs real GPUs, memory, electricity and infrastructure. Those resources, in the article’s telling, sit largely in Washington’s hands.
That shifts the relationship between government and AI firms. The old bargain, PANews says, was subsidies in exchange for building factories, hiring workers and paying taxes. The new one is different: if the state supplies computing, power, procurement and policy certainty, what does the public receive in return?
The article says people in the industry describe the proposed 5% as “regulatory insurance,” a way to trade equity for a looser environment, reduce the risk of nationalization or forced breakups, and secure a seat closer to the rule-making process.
Not every company appears willing to play along. PANews says Anthropic has not discussed transferring equity to the government.
It then describes a series of actions against Anthropic. Defense Secretary Hegseth posted on X that Anthropic would be treated as a “supply chain risk,” a label the article says had previously been reserved for foreign adversary suppliers, and required defense contractors to certify in writing that they would not use Claude. Trump then posted on Truth Social directing all federal agencies to “immediately stop” using Anthropic technology. Anthropic did not back down and on March 9 sued in both San Francisco and Washington, alleging the blacklist was unconstitutional retaliation.
After Intel, the nine quantum investments and OpenAI’s proposed 5% transfer, PANews says the question of which company might be taken into the structure next has become a live Wall Street theme. It breaks the possible targets into three tiers.
Tier one: frontier AI model companies
The article names OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google and Meta. It says Google and Meta, as listed companies, would be easier to buy into technically, though the political optics would be more sensitive. With xAI, the variable is Musk himself. The article says his relationship with Trump broke down after the government’s DOGE budget-cutting project last year and has only recently recovered.
PANews also says SpaceX completed an $86 billion IPO and reached a $2.2 trillion valuation. Asked in a CNBC interview whether Musk would donate SpaceX shares to Trump Accounts, Trump said, “I think he will.” A week later, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell announced a donation of one share each to more than 2 million children’s accounts, worth about $320 million in total.
Tier two: the infrastructure layer behind AI
The article says analysts believe that if private capital cannot keep up with AI’s growing funding needs, the government may turn next to data center operators and energy infrastructure providers that supply computing power. These companies may be less visible than model developers, but PANews argues they are exactly where access to land, power grids and nuclear approvals becomes most concentrated, making them natural fits for the subsidy-for-equity model.
Tier three: names already in play
After the quantum group, the article points to IonQ, Anduril and Micron as names already trading around the theme. Anduril is described as one of the highest-valued startups in defense AI, while Micron has just donated $250 million to the Trump Account. In the article’s telling, the donation itself acts as a bid and a signal of alignment.
How the Trump Account works
The newborn account is central to the broader design in the PANews piece. It says babies born in the U.S. between 2025 and 2028 receive an automatic $1,000 Treasury contribution once their parents open an account. The money must go into an index fund tracking the S&P 500. The default option is State Street’s low-fee S&P 500 ETF, SPYM. Other choices include IVV, VTI, SPTM and ITOT. All are large-cap or total-market U.S. ETFs, with annual fees capped at 0.10%.
Families can add up to $5,000 a year with a pretax deduction, in a structure the article likens to a retirement plan. Extra contributions from employers, relatives and charities do not count toward that cap. The money cannot be withdrawn before age 18, and once the beneficiary becomes an adult the account automatically converts into an IRA. Bank of New York Mellon serves as custodian, while Robinhood helped design the companion app.
PANews cites the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, as estimating the program will cost about $17 billion by 2028. The government’s own projection, according to the article, is that the initial $1,000 will grow to at least $6,000 by the time a child turns 18.
The response from companies is another big part of the article. It lists several examples:
- Michael Dell and his wife donated $6.25 billion, covering about 25 million children under age 10 in low-income ZIP code areas with $250 each.
- Micron donated $250 million.
- Intel and Robinhood matched contributions for employees’ children.
- BlackRock and Bank of America offered employee matching programs.
- Gwynne Shotwell committed more than 2 million shares of SpaceX, one for each eligible child in that round of giving.
The Treasury then announced it would accept large charitable donations made in the form of publicly listed company shares.
PANews says the Trump Account does not directly inject capital into AI companies. Its role is slower and deeper: to create a generation with a direct financial stake in U.S. equities. From birth, children would own part of America’s asset base. If the market rises, their accounts rise. If it falls, their savings shrink.
The article says that broadens faith in “American growth.” It also notes that this is not entirely new. U.S. households are already deeply linked to equities through 401(k) plans, pensions, mutual funds and decades of index investing. What changes here is timing. Trump, in the article’s framing, moves that attachment all the way forward to birth.
The scale of the idea
PANews ends with a numerical thought experiment. If Washington were eventually able to obtain 5% stakes in 30 companies each valued at OpenAI’s reported $852 billion level, that portfolio would start life at $1.278 trillion, enough to cover one year of U.S. debt interest.
If the goal shifted from paying interest to covering principal, the article says the story becomes far more extreme. Those same 30 companies would need to rise another 25 to 31 times in aggregate. Each one would have to grow from today’s OpenAI scale into an economic entity worth more than $20 trillion.
The piece closes by arguing that AI gains and losses used to belong mostly to founders, venture capital and Wall Street. If this architecture expands, large drawdowns could also be transmitted more broadly into public finances, household accounts and political sentiment.
In PANews’ framing, the stock market is no longer just a barometer of the U.S. economy. It is being pushed deeper into the country’s fiscal structure, corporate policy and household balance sheets.