Scott's Tots, Part Three: You Know, for Kids! The Dells Brought the Laptop Batteries to the White House, and They're Swelling
On October 7, Michael and Susan Dell stood next to President Trump at the White House and told America's parents the good news. Susan Dell put it plainly: claim your child's account, because "they have money in them." Automatic enrollment is live. The Treasury says tens of millions of children now have an account waiting. The Dells' $6.25 billion is going in, $250 a kid.
This is the third episode of a series. In March we published Scott's Tots: Michael Dell Promised 25 Million Kids $250 and a Dream, which mapped the pledge onto the episode of The Office where Michael Scott promises a class of third graders their college tuition, shows up ten years later unable to pay, and hands them laptop batteries instead. In May we published Scott's Tots Closed The Loop, which added the president's Dell stock purchase, his "go buy a Dell" moment and the rally that followed.
Part three is where the batteries arrive. And they are a little puffy.
You know, for kids!
There is a better movie for this one than The Office. In The Hudsucker Proxy, Norville Barnes walks around with a scrap of paper that has a circle drawn on it. Nobody understands it. He holds it up and explains, with total sincerity: "You know, for kids!" It is a hula hoop. It makes a fortune.
The Trump Accounts story is a circle too. Every arc of it is a dated public record. Here it is, drawn with the receipts.
Arc one, the pledge. On December 2, 2025, the Dells pledged $6.25 billion to the Treasury to seed $250 into accounts for up to 25 million children aged 10 and under in lower and middle income areas. It was announced at the White House. It is the largest gift of their lives, more than double everything they had given before, per their own foundation.
Arc two, the accounts. The law requires the money to sit in a low cost fund that tracks an index of primarily US stocks. In July, Treasury picked the default for every account: SPYM, State Street's S&P 500 fund, with four other broad US index funds to come later. The fee cap is 0.1%. No bonds, no sector bets. The money is locked until the child turns 18.
Arc three, the basket. The S&P 500 includes Dell Technologies, and on September 21 Dell was promoted into the S&P 100. So when a kid's $250 lands in the default fund, a sliver of it buys Dell. A small sliver. We want to be exact about this: a few hundred dollars per child is not what moves a stock worth about $340 billion. The kids are not the engine of the circle. They are the branding.
Arc four, the stock. Ethics filings show the president's portfolio bought between $1 million and $5 million of Dell on February 10, 2026, at around $120 to $126 a share, followed by smaller purchases in March. On May 10 he told the country to go buy a Dell. On May 29 Dell posted an AI server quarter that sent the stock up almost 33% in a day. On September 23 it closed at $548.90.
Then back to the top of the circle. Michael Dell owns nearly 40% of Dell. Bloomberg's index had his fortune up about $107 billion in 2026 by early September. The pledge that started the circle is about 6% of what the circle paid him in one year.
The laptop batteries
In the Office episode, the batteries are the insult: you were promised college, here is a lithium cell. In our version, the battery is the $250.
It was bought into the stock market near the top of a steep AI rally, at whatever price the index happened to carry the week a parent clicked "claim." It cannot be touched for up to 18 years. Right now it is swelling nicely. A swollen lithium battery is also called a spicy pillow, and anyone who has worked on laptops knows the look: the trackpad stops clicking, the case starts to gap, and the thing gets fatter and fatter until somebody does something stupid with it.
Dell's own support site has the best guidance anyone has written on this. Swelling, it says, is a known characteristic of the technology and not specific to Dell. Do not use the device. Do not puncture it. We cannot improve on that as financial advice for a balance that grew because the man who wrote the gift also owns the stock that rose.
The pump, and the arc we left out on purpose
Here is the honest version of "pump and dump," because the honest version is funnier than the lazy one.
The pump is on the record. A president with a disclosed Dell position told the public to buy Dell, and the position is up roughly 4.4 times on paper. On the disclosed range that is $1 to $5 million turned into somewhere around $4.4 to $22 million. That is upper bound math on a range the filing gives, not a precise number.
The dump is not on the record. We looked, and the reporting we found shows buys, not a sale. A pump without a dump is just a very lucky trade by a very well informed investor, and we are not going to draw an arc we cannot source. So the circle in our diagram has one arc missing, in red, with the tell written next to it: the president's periodic transaction reports at the Office of Government Ethics. If a Dell sale ever shows up there, the circle closes, and you will read it here, dated.
Until then the pillow is spicy, and it has not popped.
What the cameras watched instead
Most of the coverage of the October 7 event was about Susan Dell's face. We are not doing that. It is a cheap shot, and it is also the oldest misdirection there is: everyone stares at the presenter while the trick happens at the other end of the stage. The trick here is in the fine print, so here is the fine print.
If you are a parent, here is the useful part
Claim the account, because "automatically enrolled" is not the same as funded. An account that exists is not an account you control. A parent or guardian has to claim it before anyone can contribute to it, and before the federal $1,000 seed reaches children who are eligible for it. Free money is free money. Take the $250. Take the $1,000 if your kid qualifies. None of what we wrote above is a reason to leave it on the table.
Know what you are holding. By default it is an S&P 500 fund. That means your kid owns a slice of the same AI rally that made the man who funded the account $107 billion richer this year, and it moves with that rally in both directions.
Comment on the rules while you still can. The IRS's proposed rules on what these accounts may invest in are open for public comment until October 20. That is the one point in this circle where an ordinary family gets a vote. Use it.
What we are not claiming
We are not saying the pledge is fake. The money is real and it is going into real accounts. We are not saying children's deposits are propping up Dell stock; the math says they cannot. We are not saying anyone sold. We are saying that every arc of this circle points back at the same two or three people, and that the event on October 7 was presented to parents as a gift. Some of it is. The rest is a hula hoop.
You know, for kids!
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