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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.
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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.