Chevron's CEO made $104 million while America bombed Iran

America's oil executives have pocketed $1.4 billion selling stock during the Iran war, a new investigation shows.

CEO of Chevron Corp. Mike Wirth in Washington, DC. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

President Donald Trump has told Americans not to worry about the oil and gas price spikes caused by his war in Iran.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far,” he wrote on Truth Social last month. “So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

But Trump didn’t specify who he meant by “we.” And as time has worn on, it’s become clear that he was only talking about a very small group of people.

A bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation published Wednesday reveals that America’s top oil and gas executives have been getting rich from the war at a historic pace. In the first three months of this year, oil CEOs sold $1.4 billion worth of their own stock—the fastest pace of selling in 15 years. At a dozen companies, the selling broke all-time records.

Some notable details on the who and how much, from the Journal:

Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth sold some $104 million worth of shares between January and March.

ConocoPhillips’s Ryan Lance netted about $54.3 million in share sales in March alone.

Lorenzo Simonelli, CEO of oil-field services company Baker Hughes, sold about $33 million worth of stock that same month.

The sales might prove prescient: The prospect of a cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran drove oil prices and energy stocks lower Wednesday as traders anticipated at least a temporary respite for markets.

The Journal reported that many of these sales were made through prearranged trading plans, which allow executives to schedule stock sales in automatically at specific times or share prices. Details of these plans are rarely public, but the idea is that if a sale was planned weeks or months before it happened, the executive can’t be accused of selling on inside information or timing the market.

But not all of the selling was prearranged. The Journal specifically found that $17.2 million of Wirth’s March sales had no trading plan attached—meaning it was a deliberate, in-the-moment decision to sell while Chevron’s stock was riding a wartime spike. The total value of Wirth’s recent stock sales “are equivalent to roughly four times Wirth’s 2025 reported compensation of $26.8 million,” the Journal noted.

Analysts who track insider transactions flagged similar patterns across the industry. They found that oil executives were showing signs of making active choices to cash out during the war rather than simply following automatic schedules.

"Trump's Mar-a-Lago friends seem to be making a killing off of Trump's killing," said Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of climate and energy justice at Friends of the Earth—referring to Trump's infamous dinner with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last year, where he reportedly told them he would give them everything they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations.

But this isn’t the first time a small group of extraordinarily wealthy oil CEOs used a war to make themselves richer. In the weeks after President Joe Biden said that he was “convinced” Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022, Big Oil CEOs sold almost $99 million worth of shares, according to an analysis by Friends of the Earth and BailoutWatch.

But what really makes this story remarkable is not simply that oil executives got rich from a war. It’s how perfectly legal and normal it all is, and what that legality reveals about who wins and who loses when America goes to war.

When America goes to war, the costs are distributed broadly, onto every American who drives a car or heats a home. The benefits are distributed narrowly, flowing to a small group of men whose compensation is designed to capture exactly this kind of windfall.

And the cash windfall these oil executives make from the war won’t go primarily toward yachts and private jets (they already have those). It will go toward political campaigns and lobbying organizations dedicated to fighting climate regulation, blocking clean energy policy, and fueling authoritarianism.

This cycle is a major reason the United States has failed, for decades, to mount a serious response to climate change.

Earlier this week, I was reading through a recent survey of more than 100 oil and gas executives who were asked about their thoughts on “current issues”—namely, the Iran war. I came across one response that struck me: ”I don’t like profiting from a war,” the anonymous oil executive said. “I didn’t choose this, and it feels awful.”

It’s a remarkably honest thing to say, and yet we have no idea who said it. But one thing is for sure: it probably wasn’t Mike Wirth.

Further reading

• Amidst oil price windfalls, U.S. oil majors continue to pay less tax at home than abroad

  A new analysis from the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition finds that the largest U.S. oil and gas companies continue to pay significantly more in taxes abroad than in the United States, even as they benefit from domestic tax breaks and subsidies. Among the findings:

  • ExxonMobil paid nine times as much tax to foreign countries as it did to the U.S. federal government, where its effective tax rate was just 2.6%

  • For Chevron, just 2% of its total global tax dollars went to the U.S. federal government

  • Companies paid more to countries like Libya, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE than to the U.S.

  • The three American super majors expect to pay an average of just 6.1% in federal tax on their domestic income from 2025, far below the official corporate 21% rate

• Oil and gas crisis from Iran war worse than 1973, ​1979 and 2022 together, says IEA. (The Guardian)

  Speaking as Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the waterway approached, Fatih Birol told ⁠Le Figaro newspaper that the impact of the Middle East conflict on the oil market was larger than the combined force of the twin shocks of the 1970s and the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  

  The IEA executive director also warned that the countries most at risk were developing nations, ‌which ⁠would suffer from higher oil and gas prices, higher food prices and a general acceleration of inflation, while European countries, Japan and Australia would also feel an impact.

• China stands to benefit most from the war-driven energy crisis. (Washington Post)

  China dominates renewable energy supply chains, producing a vast majority of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. Exports of these technologies were already climbing to new heights in the first two months of 2026. Now volatility in the supply of fossil fuels is set to give sales another big boost.
  

  Since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran in February, the Chinese battery maker CATL has seen its Hong Kong-listed shares jump 29.5 percent and its Shenzhen-listed shares rise 13.6 percent. The electric car giant BYD’s exports and overseas vehicle sales rose 65 percent in March year over year, according to the company’s chief executive. And Jinko Solar, one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, says exports have grown since the war.

• Trump’s EPA chief Zeldin gives keynote speech at climate-denying group’s event. (The Guardian)

  Zeldin said: “What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”