Trump NIH Director Decide Made $12,000 From Posting on X Final 12 months

• Trump’s NIH director nominee, Jay Bhattacharya, made $11,995 from posting on X final yr.
• It is a comparatively distinctive earnings supply for a nominee for a high authorities job.
• He additionally made $457,743 as a Stanford professor and $25,772 from paid speeches.

One in all President Donald Trump’s high health-related nominees has had a singular earnings supply over the past two years: posting on social media.

Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for Director of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, made $11,995 final yr as a part of X’s content material creator income program, in accordance with a monetary disclosure filed earlier this month.

Underneath that program, instituted by Elon Musk after he took over the social media platform and renamed it from Twitter, customers with a premium account can obtain payouts primarily based on engagement from different premium customers.

Previous to Trump saying his nomination in late November, Bhattacharya was a frequent poster on X, the place he boasts greater than 680,000 followers, and he joined the creator income program in 2023. Based on his ethics settlement, Bhattacharya has “ceased creating content material for compensation” and has “ceased sharing in income for content material creation for X.”

Bhattacharya rose to prominence in 2020 as a critic of COVID-related lockdowns and was a coauthor of the “Nice Barrington Declaration,” which promoted a “herd immunity” technique in opposition to the virus. In an announcement for this story, White Home spokesman Kush Desai stated that People have “misplaced confidence within the medical equipment that permit us down through the COVID pandemic” and touted Bhattacharya because the “excellent choose” for the function.

“Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been a number one voice in assist of higher transparency and efficacy in our healthcare our bodies, and that is precisely why he’s the proper choose to guide the NIH and assist ship on President Trump’s resounding mandate to Make America Wholesome Once more by restoring confidence, competence, and accountability in well being care,” Desai stated. “We stay up for his swift affirmation by the Senate.”

Bhattacharya’s principal occupation is not posting on X: He additionally earned $457,743 final yr as a professor at Stanford College.

He additionally made 1000’s of {dollars} from paid speeches, together with $20,000 from the conservative Bradley Affect Fund in October, $3,500 from the World Liberty Institute in July, and $2,272 from Hillsdale Faculty in October.

Bhattacharya additionally owns 1000’s of {dollars} in inventory in Walmart, NVIDIA, and Taiwan Semiconductor, which he has agreed to divest if confirmed.

Bhattacharya didn’t reply to a request for remark.

All of Trump’s nominees are required to file public monetary disclosures, with latest filings revealing how Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi, FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, Director of Nationwide Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth made their cash in recent times.