President Donald Trump could stand to profit from his administration’s unprecedented investments into the nuclear energy industry.
Trump has invested between $6.4 million and $19.45 million in U.S. nuclear technology companies or utility companies that operate nuclear reactors, according to a NOTUS review of his 2025 personal financial disclosure. Trump’s holdings could reap significant gains as his administration seeks to rapidly expand the nuclear industry.
Trump’s investment portfolio includes stocks from the nuclear industry’s major players among utilities, broadening the possibility for profit even as it remains unclear the extent to which companies may leverage the administration’s deregulatory environment to bet big on nuclear.
The president owns between $2.7 million and $11.5 million in Duke Energy, which operates 11 nuclear units across North and South Carolina. The president holds anywhere from $667,000 to $1.4 million in Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., and purchased as much as $1.1 million of the company’s stock in 2025. Federal elected officials are only required to report their assets in broad ranges.
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Trump purchased between $4.8 million and $12.9 million in energy stock last year as the administration launched its ambitious policy and funding campaign to scale the country’s limited nuclear power facilities into the next big clean energy source.
His stakes in these companies represent a sliver of his vast investment portfolio, which totals at least $858 million, according to his 927-page financial disclosure. Trump’s broad exposure to the U.S. economy leaves few, if any, sectors his policies wouldn’t touch, raising concerns among ethics experts about how the president profits off his administration’s work.
Trump and his family’s finances coalesced around nuclear start-ups as his energy agenda ramped up last year.
The Trump administration’s latest deal would allow U.S. energy companies to develop nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia for civil use. Trump later made the deal contingent on the U.S. ally establishing diplomatic relations with Israel by joining the Abraham Accords. The deal still needs to win congressional approval, but it raises ethics concerns. In December, Trump Media & Technology Group announced a $6 billion merger with the Taiwanese nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, which plans to complete the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant by 2031, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in losses by TMTG this year.
“We are at a point now that whenever the president announces a major official policy with a foreign government, a reasonable question arises of what’s in it for him, and that knee-jerk reaction to ask if there’s self-dealing shows how far we have come with lack of trust in government,” said Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
The Trump administration’s nuclear campaign kicked off last May, with the president signing four executive orders to streamline licensing processes, start a pilot program to test advanced nuclear reactors, and investigate the U.S.’s nuclear fuel supply.
Within three weeks of signing the executive orders, Trump acquired between $114,000 and $485,000 of stock in energy companies with nuclear facilities, including several five-figure purchases on the same day, the disclosure shows. His financial disclosure repeatedly shows dozens of single-day purchases of stock in everything from hotel groups and cosmetics companies to tech and energy businesses.
Trump’s stock portfolio includes investments in Vistra, Southern Company, Entergy, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, utilities that produce nuclear energy along with natural gas, solar energy, coal, and more.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions.” Trump has previously said that he does not communicate with the institutions in charge of his money.
“President Trump has unleashed a nuclear energy renaissance and reignited meaningful progress in America’s nuclear power production,” Rogers said in a statement to NOTUS. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and only deepen the public’s distrust in what they read.”
The Trump Organization and the utility companies did not respond to NOTUS’ requests for comment.
The Biden administration, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, reserved billions of dollars for funding nuclear projects to at least triple nuclear power generation by 2050. Former President Joe Biden pursued his own full-throttle energy agenda with billions of dollars and regulatory changes to grow the wind and solar industry as well.
Now, nuclear energy companies are benefiting from the Trump administration’s financial and policy support, which has thrust the industry to the fore as energy demand soars amid the data center buildout, and as the president deprioritizes other clean energy sources.
A month before the Saudi deal, the Department of Energy announced a $17.5 billion loan program for energy companies to purchase equipment that requires long lead times to secure. The equipment will be used to build up to ten commercial nuclear reactors jointly owned by the private power company Westinghouse, which last year reached an $80 billion agreement with the U.S. government to roll out reactors.
In January, the DOE announced $2.7 billion in contracts for U.S. companies developing enriched uranium to supply commercial nuclear reactors. The DOE has authorized 11 nuclear reactor testing projects through a pilot program announced in 2025. The DOE also launched a program to expand nuclear fuel supply chains and reduce U.S. reliance on enriched uranium and critical materials from abroad.
The pilot programs offer nuclear energy companies fast-tracked authorizations to build reactors and fuel production lines, with the possibility of later acquiring commercial licenses. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure does not show investments in the 12 companies selected for the pilot programs, most of which are privately held.
The Trump administration’s bets are yielding some positive results. Days after the Saudi deal, the Trump administration announced that four advanced nuclear reactors reached criticality, the development stage when reactors can sustain a stable nuclear fission reaction.
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