On June 12, 2026, SpaceX went public. The stock opened at $150 a share, the company raised around $75 billion, and its market value blew past $2 trillion.

One member of Congress had a family stake sitting right in the middle of it.

Lisa McClain — Michigan's 9th District representative and the No. 4 Republican in the House — disclosed that her husband, Michael, bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX. When SpaceX went public, CNBC reported that if that stake converted into SpaceX shares, the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000 — close to McClain's entire $174,000 congressional salary.

CNBC looked and couldn't find another congressional stake in SpaceX this clear-cut.

The part that matters is the timing

Here's the calendar, from the disclosure Sludge first dug up:

• December 15, 2025 — Michael McClain buys the xAI stake.
• December 22, 2025 — one week later, the Pentagon announces it's integrating xAI's Grok into GenAI.mil, its platform for military personnel.
• January 13, 2026 — three weeks after that, the Pentagon expands the deal, giving Grok access to classified Defense Department networks.
• January 7, 2026 — the purchase is finally disclosed in a congressional filing.
• February 2026 — Musk folds xAI into SpaceX.
• June 12, 2026 — SpaceX IPO.

To be fair about what's actually known: there is no evidence McClain knew about the Pentagon's plans before the purchase, no evidence she was involved in those decisions, and no evidence she or her husband traded on nonpublic information. She doesn't sit on a committee with defense or technology oversight. Members of Congress are allowed to own stock.

But McClain is not a backbencher. As House Republican Conference Chair she meets regularly with Trump and his cabinet officials. That's the whole reason the STOCK Act exists — so that when someone with that kind of access has a family portfolio, the rest of us can see it and judge for ourselves.

Which brings us to the problem.

She keeps breaking the disclosure law

McClain's household is one of the most active trading operations in Congress. Capitol Trades, which tracks congressional financial disclosures, lists her with 1,443 trades over three years — more than roughly 98% of the politicians in its database.

She has been caught filing late twice in a single year:

• August 2025 — NOTUS reported she was late reporting more than 500 stock and bond transactions made by her husband, potentially worth millions of dollars.
• October 2025 — NOTUS found she'd done it again: months late disclosing between $360,000 and $900,000 in trades, including up to $450,000 in Palantir stock sold in June, plus NuScale Power, Tesla, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Rigetti Computing and BigBear.ai.

The law gives you 45 days. She blew through it, repeatedly.

And she does this while serving on the House Financial Services Committee — including its Capital Markets subcommittee. That committee, as Michigan Advance noted, "has legislative regulatory authority over financial institutions." She helps write the rules for the markets her family trades in.

On October 20, 2025, she wrote to House Clerk Kevin McCumber to promise she'd do better: "Moreover, I am taking aggressive measures to ensure full compliance in the future."

Two months later, her husband bought the xAI stake.

Her explanation

In January, NewsNation asked McClain about the xAI purchase. Her answer, as quoted by CNBC:

"I can 100% assure you that we didn't have the insider information. Because if it was, we wouldn't have bought 100,000 shares, we would've bought a heck of a lot more."

Read that twice. The defense isn't that her family doesn't trade on what she learns in leadership meetings. The defense is that if they had, they'd have bought a bigger position.

That is a strange thing to say out loud to the people you represent.

What she says about our money

Set this next to how McClain talks when it's somebody else's paycheck on the line.

At a February 25, 2025 leadership press conference, as Elon Musk's DOGE was firing federal workers across the country, she called Democrats highlighting those workers' stories "this sad attempt of fearmongering that makes Democrats look even more deranged" and sneered that "Democrats are soliciting sob stories from bloated bureaucrats with six-figure salaries."

Six figures. That's the insult. Meanwhile a single one of her husband's late-disclosed Palantir sales was worth up to $450,000.

Three days after those remarks, 28 people had already been fired at Detroit's John D. Dingell VA Medical Center as part of 2,400 firings across the VA.

And in March 2025, when a caller named Beverly told McClain's tele-town hall that her disabled son depends on Medicaid, McClain told her: "Let me put your mind at ease. Do not listen to the Democrats that are fearmongering. There are no cuts to Medicaid." Four months later she voted for the bill that cut it. An estimated 28,864 people in Michigan's 9th District are projected to lose health coverage because of it.

Her constituents were told to calm down about losing their health care. Her family kept trading.

And then she voted for the fake fix

On July 22, 2026, the House voted on the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232–198. Every single Republican who voted — all 218, including McClain — voted yes.

Sounds like accountability. Look at what the bill actually does.

As Colorado Public Radio reported, the bill says members, their spouses and dependent children may not buy publicly traded stocks while in office — but they get to keep the individual stocks they already own, and only have to give public notice before selling. Republican leadership also bolted a voter ID bill onto it, which is why nearly every Democrat voted no.

So: a ban that doesn't make anyone give anything up. McClain's family keeps everything it already bought. And the xAI purchase at the center of this whole story was private stock in a company that wasn't publicly traded at the time — which is not what this bill covers.

There is a real bill. The Restore Trust in Congress Act (H.R. 5106) would ban members and their families from buying and selling stocks, and force them to divest within 180 days. It has 141 cosponsors, including 35 Republicans — Lauren Boebert, Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, Ralph Norman and others.

Lisa McClain is not one of them.

We deserve better

McClain's office told CNBC that "Chairwoman McClain's investments are a matter of public record. They have been made in line with all House and applicable laws."

They were not, in fact, always a matter of public record on time — twice in one year, by her own admission to the House clerk.

We're not asking for much. Show up on time with the paperwork. Don't hold stock in the companies you regulate from the Financial Services Committee. Don't mock people who lost their jobs as "bloated bureaucrats" while your household runs 1,443 trades. And when a real stock-trading ban is sitting there with 35 Republicans already signed on, sign it.

We deserve a representative focused on our portfolios — our jobs, our bills, our retirements — not her own.

Source

• Lisa McClain family stocks in Musk's xAI could benefit from SpaceX IPO — CNBC, June 12, 2026. Photo: Annabelle Gordon | Reuters.