Kazuki Oishi/Sipa USA via AP Images
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel attends the signing ceremony of the official participation agreement for Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai, April 25, 2023, in Tokyo.
Like a chronic disease, Rahm Emanuel has flared up once again in the Democratic Party. Last week, self-acknowledged “hack” David Axelrod suggested that the former House member, Obama chief of staff, and Chicago mayor should pioneer the party’s future as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Unsurprisingly, the idea has started to pick up momentum, as we have seen many times before when Rahm is desperately seeking a job.
But before we get there, Emanuel, currently the U.S. ambassador to Japan, will have to answer for some of his personal financial maneuvers while serving in a government job. Periodic transaction reports filed with the Office of Governmental Ethics over the past two years suggest that Chicago’s golden boy may be better served returning to his roots on Wall Street, given the six-figure trades he executed at highly opportune moments in U.S.-Japanese trade relations.
Among the millions of dollars of stock trades Emanuel conducted between 2021 and 2024 while serving as ambassador, one purchase jumps out. On September 29, 2023, Emanuel bought between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of stocks in CoreWeave, a leading AI cloud computing service.
Emanuel’s purchase took place one day before the Japanese government announced a $320 million subsidy to Micron Technology to manufacture storage components that are essential to the Nvidia chips which CoreWeave relies on for its AI computation services.
“The milestone announcement today by METI (Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry) and Micron symbolizes the investment and integration of our two economies and supply chains,” Emanuel said in a statement celebrating the subsidy. “And that will only accelerate from here forward.”
Emanuel has also worked closely on initiatives expanding Nvidia’s domination of AI computation through partnerships between Amazon, Nvidia, and Japanese and American universities, which he announced in April. As CoreWeave steers toward an IPO, its last funding round in May saw its stock price jump over 425 percent, suggesting Rahm made at least a million dollars off a single trade.
But CoreWeave is not the only financial action Emanuel has fit in between his official duties in Japan. He also purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Ocient stock on March 8, 2024, before the close of the firm’s series B raise. The Chicago-based data analytics company’s CEO Chris Gladwin traveled to Japan in October on a trade delegation mission to “meet with … counterparts in Tokyo to discuss strengthening economic cooperation between the State of Illinois and Japan.”
Chicago’s golden boy may be better served by returning to his roots on Wall Street.
At the end of July, Rahm also purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in Monroe Capital, a Chicago-based middle-market lender that specializes in collateralized debt obligations, the Frankenstein financial product that crashed global markets in 2008. At the same time Emanuel made this buy, Monroe closed a half-billion-dollar debt collateralization, elegantly named “Monroe Capital MML CLO XVI, LTD.”
Midwestern municipal bonds, Apollo Debt Solutions BDC, and Linden Executives LLC, a health care–focused private equity firm, round out Rahm’s Japan-era portfolio.
“There is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people,” New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted last week in response to reports that Emanuel is considering a bid for DNC chair. “If you want to know the seed of the party’s political crisis, that’s it. The DNC needs an organizer who gets people. Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail.”
Emanuel sending a fish, Godfather-style, to a political rival is a window into his hubris and a myopic view of zero-sum politics. In reality, Emanuel has typically used his positions of power to advocate for conservative fiscal policies and preemptive surrender on positive change (like telling Obama to scale back the Affordable Care Act after Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat), while zealously pursuing his personal financial ambitions.
According to reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times, between Emanuel’s departure from the mayor’s office in 2019 and his appointment as ambassador, he raked in $13 million from corporate payouts and speaking fees. This includes $700,000 in consulting fees from the technology VC fund Wicklow Capital, $310,472 as an ABC News talking head, $150,431 in board of director fees from the digital insurance marketplace GoHealth, and $77,500 in advances for his book The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World.
While progressives in the Democratic Party have balked at the suggestion that the decidedly anti-populist Emanuel should be allowed anywhere near the DNC, reports continue to emerge that he is speed-dialing DNC members to gauge the strength of his support among the browbeaten and depleted party regulars.
The odds do not seem stacked in his favor. Emanuel stands accused of covering up widespread corruption during his time as mayor, dozens of illegal lobbying violations, and the full weight of Obama’s failures to build the party (the entire role of the DNC chair), to name just a few of the most high-profile demerits.
To his credit in this unique post-election moment, Emanuel is no stranger to Donald Trump’s style of politics, his inner circle, or the moon-shot policy proposals that buoyed his campaign to victory. In 2018, months before leaving office, Emanuel partnered with Elon Musk to advance the idea of digging a tunnel between Chicago O’Hare Airport and the city center. The tunnel, widely panned by engineering experts and those with functioning frontal lobes as “impossible,” never came to fruition.
“If we succeed, it’s going to be a great thing for the city,” Musk said at the time. “And if we fail, well, I guess me and others will lose a bunch of money.”
Emanuel did not immediately respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
