Lincoln Chafee owns more Hewlett-Packard stock than Carly Fiorina

DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL candidate Lincoln D. Chafee, former governor of Rhode Island, owns more Hewlett-Packard stock than its former CEO Carly Fiorina, a Republican who also is running for president. / BLOOMBERG NEWS/ANDREW HARRER
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL candidate Lincoln D. Chafee, former governor of Rhode Island, owns more Hewlett-Packard stock than its former CEO Carly Fiorina, a Republican who also is running for president. / BLOOMBERG NEWS/ANDREW HARRER

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina may be best known as the former CEO of Hewlett- Packard, but it turns out that another candidate holds more stock in the technology firm these days.

Lincoln D. Chafee—the Democratic former governor of Rhode Island—owns $50,001 to $100,000 of Hewlett-Packard stock, according to a financial disclosure released Tuesday by the Federal Election Commission. (Candidates only have to classify assets and income by range.) Fiorina, who ran HP for six years and has made her tenure there a key selling point in the presidential race, said she owns just $1,001 to $15,000 worth of shares in the Palo Alto-based firm in a disclosure from Thursday.

That makes a certain amount of sense, considering that Fiorina was fired in 2005 amid a tumble in the company’s stock price following the controversial merger with Compaq. In campaign speeches, she has often called her termination the result of “a boardroom brawl” and blamed the decline on the tech bubble bursting for dooming the merger (critics say the move was doomed to begin with). Either way, Fiorina still invests in her former employer, though not heavily.

Fiorina and her husband entered more than 1,100 assets or source of income, many of them stock investments, on the FEC filings. They were worth approximately $59 million on their most recent federal tax filing. Chafee and his wife, who listed just 91 sources, are worth somewhere between about $24 million and $38 million, according to the FEC forms.

- Advertisement -

Neither campaign responded to a request for comment.

The two candidates, who tend to attract support from 1 or 2 percent of national voters from their party, share other investments. Fiorina, who has a masters’ from the MIT Sloan School of Management, appears to own more stock in Bank of America. Chafee, a Brown graduate from a prominent New England family, often owns more in the stocks they both picked, such as Apple, Coca-Cola, and ExxonMobil.

Other candidates, of course, may also own Hewlett-Packard—a fact that will come out as the disclosures do this week and next.

No posts to display