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Donald Trump is nothing if not a keen investor. As recent tax filings have shown, the US president has made a number of canny trades over the past few months for tech stocks like Nvidia, Apple, and Dell, flaunting any semblance of ethical financial behavior.
New reporting from the Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun revealed that Trump made another surprising investment alongside his tech stocks: a purchase of $1 to $5 million shares in a conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain called Kura Sushi. Specifically, Yomiuri reports that Trump purchased shares in the company’s American-arm, Kura Sushi USA, which operates 91 conveyor belt sushi joints throughout the continental US.
The bizarre investment quickly got the attention of Japanese netizens, who took to Yahoo Finance message boards to speculate as to what the stock trade could mean. One emerging theory: the aging president, or his ambling son Donald Trump Jr, who technically runs the president’s trust, mistook the fast-growing sushi brand for a longstanding computer hardware company.
Essentially, the hypothesis goes, the name “Kura” is somewhat similar to that of the Tokyo firm “Fujikura,” a fiber-optics and computer-hardware supplier which has seen massive growth on the back of the AI boom. Trump, whose recent investments are mostly centered around companies with leverage over the AI supply chain, may very well have mistaken the two — resulting in a hilarious investment into novelty sushi restaurants.
“Is Trump really suffering from dementia if he confuses Fujikura with Kura Sushi?” one Japanese netizen asked on the Yahoo Finance boards.
“Does Trump have any interest in sushi? I always picture him eating steak and hamburgers every day,” another mused, likely poking fun at the president’s infamous dislike of raw fish.
Whatever the reason, it’s been good news for Kura Sushi, which saw its shares rise around 5.4 percent after news of Trump’s investment broke. Fujikura has not been so lucky — its shares have tumbled by around 45.4 percent over the last week alone, and though that might not be because of Trump’s apparent mix-up, the blunder certainly hasn’t helped.
The Trump Organization has yet to comment on whether the buy order was intentional or not, but we’ll be watching if they do.
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