Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, lost over $300,000 dollars when he allowed stock call options in the gaming platform Roblox to expire, according to a new congressional disclosure report reviewed by Raw Story.
The disclosure document, digitally signed on Jan. 25 by the former speaker, lists the transaction as "100 call options purchased 12/20/21 with a strike price of $100 and an expiration date of 1/20/23 expired with no value for a total loss of $303,001." A call option is a special type of stock option contract in which a buyer has the right to purchase stock at a defined price up to a set date.
A report by Business Insider last year detailed the extensive stock investments held by Paul Pelosi. It flagged the Roblox call options, as well as investments in a variety of other companies including Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Tesla, Salesforce, Slack, and PayPal — at least some of which had business before Congress.
The Roblox investment was not the only one the Pelosis lost money on; the holdings in Tesla caused roughly half a million in losses as Elon Musk's antics at Twitter affected the stock price of his flagship business.
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Members of Congress, who are often in the unique position of regulating companies they might own stock in, are required under the STOCK Act to disclose all their individual stock trades to prevent insider trading, although a number of lawmakers in both parties have violated this rule. There is extensive bipartisan debate over going even further and banning members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks outright, limiting them to index funds and blind trusts to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Pelosi, whose family is heavily invested in such transactions, had opposed this idea in 2021 but reluctantly agreed to support a stock trading ban last February and announced consensus legislation on the matter in September. However, no vote was ever taken or even scheduled, leading some analysts to speculate she deliberately ran out the clock on passing it until Republicans took over the House.
Some Republicans have also expressed support for the proposal. Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) vowed last year to push such legislation in a GOP House, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced his own version of a ban in the Senate that he calls the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act.
