FOLLOW THE MONEY

War, Profit, and the Men Getting Rich from Iran

By Ash A. Milton  •  April 2026

Follow the Money

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against Iran — without a declaration of war, without a vote of Congress, and without a stated end date. The man who built his political brand on ending “endless wars” started one. And within days, the people closest to him started cashing in.

This is not speculation. This is receipts.

I. The Setup: An Unauthorized War With Authorized Beneficiaries

The conflict — dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” by the U.S. and “Roaring Lion” by Israel — began after nuclear negotiations in Rome collapsed. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the initial strikes. Iran launched retaliatory missile strikes across U.S. bases in Jordan, the UAE, and Qatar. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes, was effectively closed.

The International Energy Agency characterized the disruption as the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel. California gasoline topped $5 a gallon. European natural gas prices nearly doubled overnight after Iranian drones struck Qatari gas facilities. Global stock markets fell. Bond markets sold off. The cost of the war to the U.S. treasury exceeded $200 billion.

But somewhere, for someone, the numbers were going in the other direction. They had been going that way before the first missile hit.

Sources: Wikipedia, Economic Impact of the 2026 Iran War; J.P. Morgan Global Research; Morgan Stanley; IEA

II. The Oil Trade: $580 Million. Sixteen Minutes. No Explanation.

On March 23, 2026, at 6:49 a.m. Eastern Time, approximately $580 million worth of crude oil futures — Brent and West Texas Intermediate — changed hands in a single minute. No public news explained the surge. No economic data was scheduled. No Federal Reserve officials were speaking. The trading volume was nine times the average for that time of day.

Sixteen minutes later, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran had held “productive conversations,” and that he was halting planned strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure. Oil prices dropped. The S&P 500 surged more than 2.5%. Whoever held those futures contracts made an extraordinary amount of money in less than a quarter of an hour.

“Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest?” — Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called it treason. Not hyperbole — treason. He wrote that trading on classified national security information “broadcasts government plans to foreign adversaries” and raises the question of whether the possibility of insider profits may be influencing the policy decisions themselves.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, denied any negotiations had taken place at all — calling Trump’s announcement “fakenews” designed to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.” The market paused, then resumed its climb. But the question did not go away.

Because it happened again. On April 7, approximately $950 million in bets on falling oil prices were placed hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Oil fell 15% after the announcement.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is now investigating. CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have been ordered to turn over trading records. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse sent a formal letter to the CFTC on April 9. Rep. Ritchie Torres called it potentially “one of the largest instances of insider trading in history.” Rep. Sam Liccardo cited violations of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, and the STOCK Act of 2012.

The White House response: “The president performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner.”

Sources: CBS News; Fortune; CNBC; Yahoo Finance/Bloomberg; Axios; Rep. Torres letter to SEC/CFTC; Rep. Liccardo letter

III. The Protection Racket: Trump’s Sons Sell Drones to Countries Their Father Put in Danger

The architecture is almost too brazen to fully absorb: the president launches airstrikes that destabilize Gulf monarchies. Gulf monarchies suddenly need defensive weapons. The president’s sons sell them the weapons.

Florida-based Powerus, a drone manufacturer backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., is actively marketing drone interceptors to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and other Gulf states — the same states now under Iranian drone attack, the same states dependent on U.S. military protection commanded by their father. Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich told the Associated Press: “Our team is doing many demos across the Middle East right now for our interceptors.” He declined to name the countries.

“These countries are under enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want.” — Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer, Bush administration

Painter added: “This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war — a war he didn’t get the consent of Congress for.”

Bloomberg reported that the Trump sons are behind a $750 million push into drone warfare, with both of their investment vehicles making “abrupt pivots” into drones after the Iran war began. Donald Trump Jr. is also connected to Unusual Machines, a drone parts startup that secured a $620 million Pentagon loan in December 2025 — the largest in the history of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. The Pentagon is simultaneously pursuing a $1.1 billion “unleashing drone dominance” initiative to field more than 200,000 American-made drones by 2027.

The lineage of conflict runs straight. Their father created the war. The Pentagon—which their father controls—created the drone market. Their companies compete for that market while their father negotiates the war’s terms. Researcher William Hartung at the Quincy Institute described it plainly: “The emerging military tech sector has deep ties to the administration, starting with VP JD Vance’s relationship with Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who employed Vance and helped fund his Senate run. The fact that Donald Trump Jr. — not only the president’s son but a close political advisor — will now profit personally from the fate of specific military tech firms adds an even more profound conflict of interest.”

The Trump family did not create war profiteering. Defense contractor stocks — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation — surged 6%, 3.4%, and 4.7% respectively on the first day of fighting. That is the ordinary machinery of American militarism. What is different now is the directness: the president’s own sons, selling weapons to countries the president has placed in jeopardy, competing for Pentagon contracts their father’s administration created.

Sources: PBS NewsHour; AP/Military.com; Bloomberg; Responsible Statecraft; Motley Fool

IV. The Peace Envoy Who Profits From the Peace He Negotiates

If the Trump sons represent the blunt end of the family’s war profiteering, Jared Kushner represents the surgical end. The scale is larger. The conflicts are deeper. And the institutional mechanisms that might have stopped it have been deliberately dismantled.

Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, now manages approximately $6.16 billion in assets. An extraordinary 99% of that funding comes from foreign nationals — specifically sovereign wealth funds controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. These are not passive investors. These are governments. These are the governments whose fates are being negotiated by the man managing their money.

Between 2021 and 2026, as congressional investigators documented, Kushner raised billions from these three Gulf monarchies — and then turned around and invested significant portions of those funds into Israeli companies with direct ties to the military and defense sectors. He built a financial web connecting Gulf petrodollars to Israeli defense interests, and then inserted himself at the center of the diplomacy governing both.

“You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time.” — Rep. Jamie Raskin, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member

In February 2026, Trump named Kushner “Special Envoy for Peace” — a newly created position with no formal Senate confirmation, no ethics review, and no disclosure requirements. By March, Kushner was simultaneously negotiating with the very governments funding his firm while soliciting an additional $5 billion in new investment from those same governments. His representatives had already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The structural trap is almost elegantly corrupt: Affinity’s agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE include provisions allowing those governments to renegotiate terms or withdraw funds in August 2026. That means that this coming August, if any of those governments are dissatisfied with U.S. policy outcomes — outcomes Kushner is helping to shape — they hold multi-billion-dollar leverage over the president’s son-in-law. The peace envoy is financially beholden to the parties whose peace he is negotiating.

Rep. Jamie Raskin opened a formal House Judiciary investigation into Kushner on April 17, 2026, demanding documents and communications related to his foreign-funded firm and his government role. The Senate Finance Committee’s ranking member Ron Wyden and House Oversight’s ranking member Robert Garcia filed earlier demands in March. CREW — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — filed a separate complaint.

Affinity refused to cooperate with congressional investigators in 2022. There is no reason to believe it will cooperate now.

Sources: House Judiciary Committee Democrats (Apr. 17, 2026); Senate Finance Committee Ranking Members Wyden & Garcia (Mar. 19, 2026); Bloomberg; Democracy Now; Leeja Miller/Why, America?; House Judiciary letter to Kushner (Apr. 16, 2026)

V. The Prediction Markets: Gambling on Lives With Inside Information

Prediction markets — platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi where users trade on the probability of real-world events — have become a new financial instrument for war speculation. Over $200 million has been traded on Iran conflict outcomes: military timelines, leadership succession, Strait of Hormuz disruptions, nuclear deals, ceasefire dates. The market has priced the deaths of real people and the fates of real governments into buy/sell order books.

Within this space, the insider trading patterns that appeared in oil futures markets also appeared on prediction platforms. On the Friday before the war began, an unusual surge of more than 150 newly created Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting a U.S.-Iran military confrontation — before any public announcement. When Trump announced the ceasefire, newly created accounts with no trading history generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits in hours, having placed their bets while Trump’s public rhetoric still signaled escalation.

Axios documented the pattern: the trades are not random. They are precise. They move before announcements, not after. And they move in the right direction every time.

The Axios analysis captured the essential obscenity of this moment: “As the Iran war sends prices soaring for ordinary Americans, a select few appear to be profiting in plain sight.” The men doing the profiting are connected to the man making the decisions. Whether that connection is proven criminal may take years. Whether it is morally comprehensible takes seconds.

Sources: Axios; Polymarket; Bitcoin News analysis; Rep. Torres letter to SEC/CFTC

VI. The Broader Machine: What War Has Always Been For

None of this happens in isolation. The Iran war, unauthorized and undefined, is generating a $500 billion proposed increase in the Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2027 — bringing total proposed military spending to $1.5 trillion. Defense contractors are processing that as a multi-year revenue guarantee. Northrop Grumman’s backlog of orders hit a new high of $96 billion. Lockheed Martin is described by investment analysts as a potential “never sell” stock. Morgan Stanley advised clients to increase exposure to “defense, security, aerospace, and industrial resilience.”

Meanwhile, the Thiel-Vance-Musk network — documented in detail in prior reporting at this publication — runs through the defense-tech stack like a wire through a wall. Palantir. Anduril. Vulcan Elements. Companies backed by Founders Fund, Vance’s patron, are now holding Pentagon contracts worth tens of billions. The vice president’s former employer is processing the intelligence architecture of the war he now helps direct.

And who pays? American consumers paying $5 for a gallon of gas. American workers whose mortgage rates climbed to 6.38% as bond yields surged. American soldiers — four of whom were killed by a drone strike in Kuwait. Iranian civilians whose country was struck without any declaration of war from the nation that calls itself the world’s oldest constitutional republic.

Former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served under George W. Bush and is no partisan firebrand, said it plainly: “This will be the first presidential family to make a lot of money off a war.”

The slogan was “America First.” The practice is “Family First.” And the cost is paid by everyone else.

Sources: Motley Fool; Responsible Statecraft; PBS NewsHour; Morgan Stanley; Axios

★ ★ ★

VII. Meanwhile, Somewhere Else Entirely

While the men of empire count their money, there are communities on this earth — small in number, enormous in contrast — that have organized human life around a different principle entirely.

The Mosuo of southwestern China’s Himalayan foothills — roughly 40,000 people — have no word in their language for “father” or “husband.” The grandmother is the most respected figure in every household. Property passes through the female line. Women make the business decisions. Children are raised in their mothers’ homes. Men do not inherit; they are not the axis around which wealth, land, and lineage turn. There are no oil futures traded on the grandmothers’ decisions. There are no weapons sold to neighboring communities that the Mosuo elders have placed in jeopardy.

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia — four million people and the world’s largest matrilineal society — pass property, inheritance, and surnames from mother to daughter. Their philosophy, adat, centers on nurturing both people and the natural world. The central family home is managed by a designated matriarch. Men hold political roles, but the inheritance of those roles flows through their mothers and sisters — through women.

The Khasi of Meghalaya in northeastern India live in a society where women choose their own partners, where divorce carries no stigma, where property flows through female lines, and where the accumulated moral authority of the community rests with women. The Bribri of Costa Rica and Panama pass land and tradition through the mother’s line, and grandmothers hold the knowledge that cannot be transferred to sons — only to daughters and their children. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy of northeastern North America, whose governance structures arguably influenced the framing of the U.S. Constitution itself, vested political authority in Clan Mothers, who held the power to appoint and remove chiefs.

In their scholarship on matrilineal and matrifocal societies, researchers have noted a consistent pattern: these communities are not organized around conquest, accumulation, or dominance. German researcher Heide Goettner-Abendroth, who spent decades studying such societies, argued that they represent not the mirror image of patriarchy but something categorically different — structures “free of domination,” stabilized not by force but by code, by relationship, by the authority of those who give and sustain life rather than those who end it.

The few remaining matrilineal and matriarchal societies on this earth are not at war with anyone. Their only fight — the only fight forced upon them — is survival against the system that surrounds them.

Let that sit for a moment.

While Jared Kushner routes Saudi petrodollars through Israeli defense companies. While Eric and Donald Trump Jr. pitch drone interceptors to Gulf monarchies their father put in danger. While $580 million moves in oil futures markets sixteen minutes before a Truth Social post. While the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow throat of the global economy — becomes a chip in a negotiation between men who will never stand anywhere near it — the Mosuo grandmother tends her household. The Minangkabau matriarch manages her land. The Khasi woman chooses her partner and keeps her property. The Haudenosaunee Clan Mother decides who leads.

None of these societies sent a single warship into the Persian Gulf. None of them is funding a prediction market on whether a ceasefire holds. None of them is shorting oil futures on classified information. They do not have empires to protect, because empires — the accumulation of power by the few at the cost of the many — are not what they built.

Their fight is not the fight they chose. It is the fight the patriarchy brought to their doorstep: the relentless pressure of assimilation, of extraction, of being swallowed by nation-states whose logic is fundamentally incompatible with their own. The Mosuo face tourism and Han Chinese development pressure. The Minangkabau navigate between their adat traditions and the encroaching demands of the Indonesian state and global Islam. The Haudenosaunee have been fighting this particular fight since 1492.

They did not start that fight either.

And before the inevitable objection arrives — “But women have led wars too” — let us look at that honestly. Yes. They have.

Boudica, queen of the Iceni in what is now England, led a revolt against Roman occupation in 60 CE. But she did not choose that war. The Romans had annexed her husband’s kingdom upon his death, flogged her publicly, and raped her daughters. She rose because the empire came for her family and her people. Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae in Central Asia, defeated Cyrus the Great of Persia in 530 BCE — the mightiest conqueror of the ancient world, founder of the largest empire yet assembled. She did not march on Persia. Cyrus marched on her. He came with 200,000 soldiers and a marriage proposal designed to seize her kingdom through deception. She refused him, warned him to leave, and when he used wine as a weapon to intoxicate and capture her son — who then died in captivity — she went to war. She is recorded in history as one of the most ferocious military commanders who ever lived. She was defending her home.

Elizabeth I of England, when the Spanish Armada bore down on her island in 1588, stood before her troops at Tilbury and declared she had “the heart and stomach of a king.” She was fighting off an invasion. Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, became one of the fiercest leaders of the 1857 Indian uprising against the British East India Company — because the British had seized her kingdom after her husband’s death and refused to recognize her adopted son as heir. The pattern is not subtle. These women did not build empires. They defended what was being taken from them.

There are exceptions. Catherine the Great expanded Russian territory. There have been women who ruled within patriarchal systems and absorbed patriarchal logic fully enough to replicate its worst instincts. History is not a fable. But if you run the scan across five thousand years of recorded warfare — the wars of expansion, the wars of resource extraction, the wars launched to seize land and subjugate peoples and consolidate power in the hands of a ruling class — you will find that the architects of those wars are overwhelmingly, relentlessly, structurally male. Not because men are born violent. Because patriarchy is a system, and systems produce consistent outcomes. It concentrates power, weaponizes hierarchy, and rewards the men who use force to accumulate more of both.

The women who went to war, in most of the cases history has left us, went because the system came for them first. That is not a small distinction. That is the entire distinction.

History does not offer us a guarantee that matrilineal societies are inherently peaceful or that women in power are inherently virtuous. What history offers is this: the wars of the last five thousand years — the empires, the crusades, the colonial extractions, the proxy conflicts, the authorized and unauthorized military operations, the futures contracts placed sixteen minutes before a Truth Social announcement about whether to bomb a power plant — were overwhelmingly conceived, authorized, funded, and profited from by men.

Not all men. Not men by nature. Men by structure. Men by a system that for millennia has organized power, property, and violence around male bodies and male inheritance — and called it civilization.

The Mosuo grandmother has a different word for it. Actually, she has no word for it at all. In her language, there is no word for the thing that just started a war in the Persian Gulf and shorted oil futures before announcing a pause.

In her language, there is no word for “husband.”

Maybe that is the point.

About the Author

Ash A. Milton is a Generation X feminist, veteran, and former Agency Cyber Advisor with a federal cybersecurity background. She publishes long-form political and cultural commentary at ashamiltonuniverse.com.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• Wikipedia: Economic Impact of the 2026 Iran War

• J.P. Morgan Global Research: US-Israel Military Operation Against Iran: Are Markets on Edge? (March 2026)

• Morgan Stanley: Iran Conflict: Oil Price Impacts and Inflation; Iran War Oil Shock: Stock Market Impacts (March 2026)

• Washington Times: Oil prices drop 9% and Wall Street rallies to a record after Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz (April 17, 2026)

• CBS News: Oil trades surged just before Trump’s post on Iran talks. Some experts are suspicious.

• Fortune: Nobel laureate calls it ‘treason’: $580 million traded minutes before Trump’s oil reversal

• Axios: Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war (March 25, 2026)

• CNBC: Regulators are reportedly zeroing in on suspicious trades ahead of market-moving Trump post (April 15, 2026)

• CNBC: House Dem Sam Liccardo probes suspicious oil trades during Iran war (April 17, 2026)

• Yahoo Finance/Bloomberg: CFTC Investigates Suspicious Oil Trades Before Trump’s Iran War Shifts

• Rep. Ritchie Torres: Letter to SEC and CFTC Chairs demanding investigation

• PBS NewsHour: Company backed by Trump sons looks to sell drone interceptors to Gulf states

• AP/Military.com: Company Backed by Trump Sons Looks to Sell Drone Interceptors to Gulf States Being Attacked by Iran

• Bloomberg: Trump Sons Are Behind a $750 Million Push Into Drone Warfare (March 13, 2026)

• Responsible Statecraft: Trump wages war, his sons get payoff through savvy investments (March 18, 2026)

• Daily Kos: From ‘America First’ to ‘Family First’: Trumps’ Hidden Profits from Iran War (April 14, 2026)

• U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democrats: Ranking Member Raskin Opens Sweeping Investigation into Jared Kushner (April 17, 2026)

• Senate Finance Committee: Wyden, Garcia Investigate Kushner Raising Billions from Middle East Governments (March 19, 2026)

• Bloomberg: Kushner’s Mideast-Backed Fund Assets Jump to $6.2 Billion (March 23, 2026)

• Democracy Now: Jared Kushner Seeks $5 Billion for Private Equity Firm While Serving as Mideast Negotiator

• Leeja Miller / Why, America?: Jared Kushner’s War (March 20, 2026)

• Heide Goettner-Abendroth: Matriarchies as Societies of Peace: Re-thinking Matriarchy

• Inanna Publications: Societies of Peace: Matriarchies of Past, Present and Future

• Unearth Women: Matriarchal Societies Where Women Run Things

• HowStuffWorks Science: Matriarchy: What Does a Society Run by Women Look Like?

• untraveled.com: Matriarchal Societies: Where in the World are Women in Charge?

• EBSCO Research Starters: Matriarchy (Political Science)

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