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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi”

“Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”.

Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have historically been held to account for the _appearance_ of conflict of interest, and that this is a good thing for a democracy. They have historically avoided this in high office by divesting or placing assets in a blind trust, something Trump did not do. NYT has a journalistic duty to report this conflict of interest and did so while saying it is small.

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The article further explains:

"HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free

Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another

Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil

The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date

The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund

(More sourcing for all that here.)

It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.

What is misleading about saying Trump “small personal financial interest”? That seems pretty clear cut and truthful.

What do you think a “small personal financial interest” is to a billionaire?! A few million? A few hundred thousand?! Not less than $2k. C’mon man.

It... doesn't matter? The criticism that the statement is wrong isn't right if the statement isn't wrong.

Because there's an obvious implication that Trump is pushing the drug because he has a financial interest in pushing the drug. But if his financial interest is so small that he stood to gain hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands at most, then implying he's doing it for financial reasons is extremely dishonest.

There's a big space between "implying he's doing it for financial reasons" and "reporting on the presence of a financial interest". It would be worse reporting to _omit_ the financial interest rather than include it.

I probably have a proportional exposure to SNY via index funds as what Trump is reported to have, compared to his fortune. I would say that there would be very little value in reporting that interest in any context. Certainly it would tend to make most readers think that the financial interest may serve as an improper motivation, when there is no likelihood that that is the case.

Mr Trump also holds a “small financial interest” in the McDonalds Corporation, having once purchased a hamburger.

Imagine that Alice's net worth is an even billion dollars. Alice buys a tiny stake, $1000 or so, in ACME Industries. This is financially immaterial to Alice. It's 0.0001% of her net worth. But the purchase gives her access to all of the information which must be legally shared with investors, and is a common way investors keep tabs on publicly-traded companies.

Now, imagine that Bob's net worth is $10,000. Alice's investment is equivalent to Bob investing a single penny in ACME Industries.

The headline "Alice and Bob establish a small financial interest in ACME Industries" might be technically true in the most stringent sense, but it doesn't really align with how the phrase "financial interest" is used in common speech.

It's not even relevant information about either Alice or Bob.

This is one of those things that barely skates along the line of honesty. It's like a company that says "We Don't Sell Your Data!" in large type with a tiny asterisk on the end. When you read the fine print attached to said asterisk, there are all kinds of exceptions for "trusted partners" and "quality assurance". To all intents and purposes, that company does, in fact, sell your data.

This just isn't how you establish or maintain trust.

>But the purchase gives her access to all of the information which must be legally shared with investors...publicly-traded companies.

Publicly traded companies must share this information with the public.

Not all of it. As a shareholder, you get access to shareholder meetings (not public), can vote on certain issues raised by the board, etc.

I don’t know. The term “small” made it sound — small. You can argue the other points of the article, but this doesn’t seem like a real mischaracterization.

$1,485 sounds extraordinarily small! Sanofi is the 70th largest company in the world [0]. If you have even a few hundred thousand dollars invested in a diversified way, you probably have more Sanofi exposure than that.

So yeah, if Sanofi makes money, Trump's thousand dollar investment pays dividends, but he was actually underweight in it. It would be more meaningful and equally truthful to say "Mr. Trump has a financial interest in Sanofi's competitors".

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-...

If someone worth a million dollars had a $1.50 stake in some venture, would that be worth mentioning?

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