On Sunday, as the stock market appeared ready to tumble amid President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements, Nikita Bier did what he does best: trolling.
The tech entrepreneur, who famously (opens in new tab) sold two shockingly similar apps to Meta and Discord, posted to X a picture of the predicted stock freefall. “SELL EVERYTHING!” he wrote. (opens in new tab) “IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD.”
But Bier wasn’t selling everything — instead, like a handful of his tech friends, he was buying the dip. “I bought 450 TQQQ calls and 30 /ES future contracts in the morning,” he wrote, (opens in new tab) meaning he made a huge, highly leveraged bet on the NASDAQ and S&P 500 going up. “Closed out both (around a $400k gain).”
He confirmed the trades in a phone call with The Standard.
Bier and his peers were just following the president’s orders. On Wednesday morning, Trump gave some subtle advice to his supporters: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” he wrote (opens in new tab) on Truth Social. The post came during a dour time for the U.S. market — for days, the S&P 500 had plummeted due to Trump’s tariffs on all U.S. trading partners, including an extra severe tax on China.
But about three hours later, the president fulfilled his own prophecy, announcing a 90-day pause on his aggressive tariff plan that sent the S&P 500 skyrocketing by more than 9%.
For those in Silicon Valley, the market’s hockey-stick trajectory looked awfully familiar — and awfully lucrative. “No, this isn’t a crypto meme coin …” one anonymous account tweeted. (opens in new tab) “It’s the American stock market after the President of the United States told you to buy.”
A handful of techies like Bier took Trump at his word, buying and quickly selling stock to make a quick buck, not unlike how savvy traders made money from pumping and dumping Trump’s meme coin (opens in new tab).
Take Austen Allred, the founder of coding school BloomTech, who tweeted a prediction of Trump’s strategy Monday, as the S&P 500 fell 0.2% (opens in new tab). “He’ll get whatever tariff reductions from other countries he can, try to get a rate cut, then do whatever he can to let stocks rip,” he wrote. (opens in new tab) “This is the most obvious trade I’ve seen since I made a bunch of money shorting SVB (sorry).”
Allred posted his trades (opens in new tab), which were high-risk, short-term bets that the S&P 500 would pop sharply by the end of the week. He announced that his haul was about $35,000, and the replies filled with those following his lead, to varying results.
“I did buy,” wrote John Melas-Kyriazi, (opens in new tab) cofounder of venture capital software company Standard Metrics. “But I’m disgusted with myself how little I bought.”
The window of opportunity was slim — by Thursday, the markets were down again. Bier wrote that in the age of the internet (when, say, the president can send out an immediate viral tweet instructing the American public to buy), stock market cycles “keep getting faster.”
“A rule of thumb is that each successive one will always be half the duration of the previous one,” he wrote in a January tweet (opens in new tab)that he reposted in the wake of his fresh $400,000. “Any time you feel you should wait a little longer, you have waited too long.”
Of course, the real winners in Silicon Valley were the ones who didn’t have to trade a thing. According to Bloomberg (opens in new tab), Elon Musk got $36 billion richer Wednesday as Tesla stock leaped 23%, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth increased by about $26 billion, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang scored $15.5 billion.
Until the trade war is over, the real losers are still the American public. A Reuters report (opens in new tab)estimated that the tariffs could send the cost of an iPhone skyrocketing into the thousands, economists say (opens in new tab)inflation will likely increase, and the economies of some states, like Michigan (opens in new tab), are already feeling the hit.
But those who trusted the president ended the week with a little more money in their pockets. “I expect apologies from the people who told me I was wrong,” Allred tweeted. (opens in new tab)“And to see the gains of the people who thought I was right.”