Quentin Young
Posted March 5, 2026
As corporations ally themselves with the Trump administration, Americans have sought to punish them for their complicity in the country’s slide into dictatorship.
But it’s impossible for a Coloradan to fully disengage from many of the companies that are often viewed as the worst offenders. That’s because Colorado invests public money — billions of dollars that belong to Colorado taxpayers — in those companies.
Officials say state investments should be managed to achieve the best returns and ensure asset safety, and investment restrictions based on shifting partisan interests or political passions could easily overwhelm fiduciary concerns.
But rarely has corporate behavior been so implicated in threats to democracy and even the very economic system that makes productive investment possible. Divestment would serve a moral principle. But it could also be enacted as self-preservation.
If Coloradans don’t want public money to benefit Trumpist companies, they would have to make that preference abundantly clear to state representatives.
At the top of the corporate enemies list is Palantir. The mass surveillance AI firm, until recently headquartered in Denver, was co-founded by Peter Thiel, the democracy-hating uber tech-bro Trump ally. Co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, a bloodthirsty, movie villain-style corporate boss, leads a company that has provided secretive, lethal services to the Pentagon and, more recently, helped supercharge the Trump administration’s lawless mass deportation program. Last year The New York Times reported that Trump had tapped Palantir to help him “compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” It is “the most dangerous corporation in America,” according to Robert Reich, the former Labor secretary.
Other companies in the crosshairs of democracy defenders: Amazon, which grossly overpaid for the rights to the documentary “Melania” about the first lady in what was widely viewed as a bribe, and which is notorious for its role in mass surveillance; Tesla, founded by Elon Musk, who spent $250 million getting Trump elected and last year oversaw the catastrophic DOGE rampage through the federal government; Apple, which donates money to Trump vanity projects and whose CEO gives the president personal tributes; and The GEO Group and CoreCivic, which run immigration detention centers, including the ICE facility in Aurora.
Public money in Colorado supports all of them.
The state retirement fund had $88 million invested in Palantir stock as of the fund’s most recent report, released in September. The Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association also had $336 million invested in Tesla stock, $1.2 billion in Amazon, and $1.8 billion in Apple, as well as smaller interests in The GEO Group and CoreCivic.
The Colorado treasurer invests state tax revenues in various instruments, such as commercial paper and corporate bonds. These investments support the likes of Amazon and Apple, as well as other companies that are closely aligned with Trump, such as Home Depot, ExxonMobil, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin.
The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Trump engaged in insurrection and was not even eligible to be on the 2024 ballot, let alone serve as president. Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, says Trump is trying to undermine the 2026 election. How can Colorado treat Trump like a state enemy and at the same time fund his enablers?
The Legislature has options.
In 2016, state lawmakers decided they did not want PERA to invest in companies that had taken a stance in favor of the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment, sanctions — or BDS — movement. The anti-BDS law prompted the state pension in 2022 to divest from Ben & Jerry’s over the ice cream maker’s decision to stop selling its products in the occupied West Bank. The pension maintains a list of companies marked for divestment (the number of such companies is currently zero).
State lawmakers could enact similar divestment criteria for public money around the provision of material support to a domestic dictatorship.
The state treasury and the investments it makes are governed by provisions in the state constitution and statutes. Those laws bar the state treasury from investing money from its main fund in stocks, for example. Dave Young, the Democratic state treasurer, said in an interview with Newsline that his office’s investment team makes decisions with an eye to three qualities: “We look at return on investment, we look at liquidity and safety,” he said.
When politics enters the equation, it can degrade the performance of state investments while doing little to hurt a targeted company. But the treasury would follow new legislative guidance on investment criteria, he said.
“It’s one of those political things,” he said. “What is the will of the people on this? And it’s often pretty hard to tease that out.”
If Coloradans don’t want public money to benefit Trumpist companies, they would have to make that preference abundantly clear to state representatives.
Quentin Young is the editor of Colorado Newsline. This commentary is republished from Colorado Newsline under a Creative Commons license.
