A companion piece on this site traced In-Q-Tel, the CIA-created investment vehicle that has put government capital into more than 300 private companies since 1999, more than a third of them never publicly announced. That is one position on a dial: government capital, invisible by design. There is a third position, and it is the opposite of hidden — since mid-2025, the United States government has stopped just funding companies and started owning them, in deals filed with the SEC like any other shareholder's.

The clearest case is also the largest. In August 2025, the government purchased 433.3 million shares of Intel at $20.47 each — an $8.9 billion position, a 9.9 percent stake — making it one of the company's largest shareholders. The money wasn't new appropriation. $5.7 billion of it was CHIPS Act grant money Intel had already been awarded but not yet paid, and $3.2 billion came from a separate secure-chips program, both converted into equity instead of being paid out as grants. The government agreed to stay passive — no board seat, and it committed to vote with Intel's own board on shareholder matters — but it also took a five-year warrant for an additional 5 percent, exercisable only if Intel's ownership of its own chip-foundry business drops below 51 percent.^[1]

Two months earlier, the Pentagon had done the same thing to a much smaller company for a much larger share of it. The Department of Defense put $400 million into MP Materials, the country's largest rare-earth mining and magnet company, in exchange for convertible preferred stock and warrants — a 15 percent stake on an as-converted basis, enough to make the Pentagon MP Materials' largest shareholder, ahead of both its CEO and BlackRock. It was the first time the federal government became a major shareholder in a critical-minerals company, and it came bundled with a separate $150 million loan and a commitment to buy 7,000 metric tons of rare-earth magnets a year for a decade.^[2]

The pattern kept repeating. In January 2026, the Commerce Department took an 8-to-16-percent equity position in USA Rare Earth, bundled with $277 million in direct CHIPS Act funding and $1.3 billion in senior secured debt.^[3] In July 2026, GlobalFoundries signed a letter of intent for a $300 million CHIPS Act award to develop next-generation silicon photonics — and alongside the grant, the Commerce Department took roughly a 1 percent equity stake in the company itself, a detail GlobalFoundries' own announcement framed as letting "the American public share in GF's growth."^[4]

The same mechanism has a darker companion case. Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet startup founded in 2023, took an investment from 1789 Capital — the venture fund where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner — in its 2025 Series A. Three months later, the Pentagon committed $620 million to Vulcan, its largest single loan ever issued through the Office of Strategic Capital, worth roughly twice the company's entire prior valuation. A ProPublica investigation, drawing on Defense Department records and interviews with Pentagon officials, found the loan wasn't initiated through any standard application process — it followed a direct request from White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a longtime friend of Trump Jr.'s. Lawmakers forced a subpoena vote over the deal.^[5]

Three companies took government money without giving up a share of themselves for it. Four gave up a share, in the open, filed with regulators, defended in press releases as taxpayers sharing in the upside. One took government money that arrived through a channel investigators are still trying to explain. All five sit on the same dial as In-Q-Tel's undisclosed investments and the CHIPS Act's disclosed grants — the same lever, government capital shaping which companies win, just occupying a different position on how visible, and how accountable, that shaping is allowed to be.