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Big banks saw their stocks skyrocket by 29 percent during Trump’s first year. Here’s who else cashed in.
The first year of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president has been a most profitable one for the Trump family and its inner circle. By now, much has been reported about the web of conflicts — the unapologetic ethical morass — that defines the second Trump administration and the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, foreign business deals, military contracts, and more.
But beyond the Trump clan itself, major industries and their billionaire leaders who rule over us all — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, Big Oil to Big Crypto — have profoundly benefited from the administration’s first year. Many of these corporate actors have cozied up with Trump through piles of campaign and inauguration contributions, as well as donations to his White House ballroom project.
They’ve been the big winners over the past year, raking in billions from a policy agenda overseen by Trump and his administration stacked with billionaires and industry-friendly regulators.
“Deregulatory Bonanza” for Wall Street
Wall Street and its coterie of financial oligarchs have been prime beneficiaries of Trump’s first year. This is especially true of big banks, which saw their stocks skyrocket by 29 percent in 2025.
The bullishness around banks springs largely from Trump’s lax regulatory regime. This includes the weakening of antitrust oversight, to the glee of big banks profiting from ramped-up mergers and acquisitions, and the appointment of corporate-friendly regulators to key financial cabinet and oversight roles.
The Trump administration has looked to erode regulatory oversight rules of banks that were created after the 2007-2008 financial crash. It’s attempting to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created in 2010 to protect consumers from financial industry abuses. It’s also looking to loosen scrutiny of all but the biggest banks and relax corporate disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In August, Trump signed an executive order opening up millions of 401(K) retirement accounts to riskier and less regulated private equity and cryptocurrency investments. Trump has also attacked the so-called “debanking” of conservative-aligned industries like cryptocurrency, firearms, fossil fuels, and private prisons, which many argue present ethical and financial risks to lenders.
“The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker,” said The New York Times.
One major beneficiary of these policies is Jamie Dimon, the longtime billionaire CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the U.S.’s biggest bank.
Dimon — who appears to be chumming up with Trump after years of tension — raked in around $770 million in 2025 through a “combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank’s shares,” whose value rose 34 percent last year, according to The New York Times.
Other bank executives — at Citi, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, and more — have also massively cashed in.
Trump-Aligned Investors
Trump-aligned asset managers and private equity and hedge fund billionaires have also benefited from the administration’s first year.
After opposing Trump for years, mega-investor Jeff Yass, the wealthiest Pennsylvanian, “morphed into a supporter” of Trump after the 2024 election result, notes The Washington Post.
Yass has donated at least $2.5 million toward Trump’s White House ballroom and has given $16 million to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC. He also helped pay for Trump’s presidential transition.
Yass’s support for Trump has paid off twofold. First, after meeting with Yass in early 2024, Trump reversed his position on banning TikTok — whose parent company Yass has a 15 percent stake in — and last year allowed his billionaire allies to oversee its U.S. version. Second, Trump is backing Yass’s true passion of education “reform” through vouchers and other school privatization schemes.
Yass’s net worth at the end of 2024 was just under $50 billion. Today, it’s over $65 billion.
Paul Singer, who founded and runs Elliott Investment Management, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, and is worth close to $7 billion, dumped $5 million on Trump’s reelection and contributed to his transition. In addition to benefiting from Trump’s Wall Street-friendly tax bill, including its failure to eliminate the carried interest tax loophole, Singer could gain big from Trump’s imperial oil grab in Venezuela.
A U.S. court backed Elliott’s acquisition last year of Citgo, the Houston-based refining giant owned by Petróleos de Venezuela, Venezuela’s state-run oil company. The Wall Street Journal has called Citgo the “Crown Jewel of Venezuela’s Oil Industry” and the “Venezuela’s most valuable foreign oil asset.”
The Venezuelan government has challenged the deal, which isn’t finalized, but Singer stands to profit big from increased Venezuelan oil production.
As Truthout has reported, other Trump-friendly asset manager billionaires, like BlackRock’s Larry Fink, have benefited from Trump’s hemispheric saber-rattling, with BlackRock last year striking a deal to acquire a huge portfolio of global ports, including two strategic Panama canal ports.
Crypto Billionaires
During his first year of his second term, Trump embraced being “the first crypto president” and promised to make the U.S. the “Bitcoin Superpower.” He followed through with a wave of pro-crypto regulatory appointments and policy shifts that have benefited the crypto billionaires who massively donated to his reelection and inauguration.
Some of Trump’s and the GOP’s biggest crypto backers — such as Binance, Ripple Labs, and the Winklevoss twins — have been wined and dined at the White House and had federal lawsuits and penalties against them frozen, dropped, or weakened.
“Since Trump returned to office,” reports The New York Times, “the S.E.C. has eased up on more than 60 percent of ongoing cases against crypto industry firms” that it inherited from the Biden administration, in some cases pausing litigation and attempting to lessen penalties.
The administration “abandoned crypto industry cases at a far higher rate than it did other cases,” The New York Times also noted, adding that “in five out of the seven crypto cases the S.E.C. ditched, the defendants either had ties to Trump family businesses or had donated to his ballroom, inauguration or political causes.”
“It is unheard-of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry,” The New York Times noted.
This shift was aided by a crew of pro-crypto regulatory appointments, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. Additionally, pro-crypto mega-billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have one of their own in Silicon Valley billionaire David Sacks serving as Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”
Fossil Fuel Profiteers
The fossil fuel industry deployed tens of millions of dollars toward Trump’s reelection, and it’s unquestionably been a top beneficiary of Trump’s first year in office.
Trump has fulfilled his campaign promise to “drill baby drill,” appointing a slew of fossil fuel-aligned cabinet members and regulators, and implementing a wave of deregulatory policies that include approving new fracked gas terminals, opening up federal lands and waters for drilling, slashing environmental regulations, pulling out of global climate agencies, gutting environmental justice aid, and going to war against renewable energy infrastructure.
Driving this agenda are top Trump allies like oil billionaire Harold Hamm, founder of drilling giant Continental Resources and one of Trump’s early supporters.
“The alliance” between Trump and Hamm, reports The New York Times,“is now playing a big role in American energy,” and “together, they have remade federal policy to benefit oil and gas companies” and “put off the transition to greener alternatives like solar power and batteries.”
Hamm and Continental Resources expect to benefit big from Trump’s fossil fuel policies and oil-friendly tax bill.
As Truthout has reported, corporations and investors tied to the fracking industry — from oilfield service companies like Halliburton to pipeline giants like Energy Transfer — are also profiting from Trump’s proactive effort to supply the data center boom’s insatiable energy demand with fossil fuels.
Other Trump pals, like Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, not only benefit generally from Trump’s broad policy agenda, but could also profit from his effort to control Venezuela’s oil industry, which Chevron where has significant inroads.
Tech Billionaires
Tech corporations and billionaires have been major beneficiaries of Trump’s first year, with their stocks and revenues soaring, as the president has adamantly backed their core interests, including turbocharging the construction of data centers that power artificial intelligence (AI), gutting state-level AI regulations, cutting limits of AI chip exports, and approving chip exports by chipmaking behemoth Nvidia to China.
“The biggest tech companies have gotten almost everything they wanted from Mr. Trump,” commented The New York Times.
Tech barons have joined Trump’s inner circle, and companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are helping to bankroll Trump’s White House ballroom.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has won over Trump while Trump-aligned tech billionaires like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison — who also benefited from the Trump administration’s TikTok restructuring and approval of Paramount’s sale — are partnering on Trump-backed AI deals.
Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, whose wealth has skyrocketed to $725 billion and is set to become the world’s first trillionaire, have seen a wave of friendly regulators appointed by Trump and enjoy a slew of government contracts across agencies.
As Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar,” Musk ally David Sacks has become “one of the Trump administration’s top technology officials,” reports The New York Times, who has “offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies.”
Sacks enjoys a “special government employee” status allowing him to remain in private industry and “has positioned himself to personally benefit” from policies he helps oversee, The New York Times writes, adding that Sacks “has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies.”
Musk and Sacks ally Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies and longtime backer of Vice President JD Vance, has been a prime beneficiary of Trump’s first year, seeing record earnings and hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, including providing the tech backbone of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and deportation machinery through its data management software.
These Trump-aligned tech billionaires and corporations, as well as others like Lucky Palmer’s Anduril, are also benefiting from expanding military contracts tied to AI, drones, and other hardware.
Taking on the Billionaire Class
While Trump’s corporate and billionaire allies cashed in from the first year of his administration’s second term, they’ve also faced escalating popular opposition.
Massive “Tesla Takedown” protests across the nation against Elon Musk helped tank the car company’s stock. There’s rising opposition to corporations like Palantir that profit off war abroad and deportations and surveillance at home. Tech workers are challenging Silicon Valley powerhouses over their ties to genocide. Massive “No Kings” protests have focused in part on the corporate oligarchs enabling and benefiting from Trump’s regime.
As billionaire wealth grows above while precarity and insecurity persist below, the stark contrast between the haves and have-nots — and the popular resistance to entrenched corporate power — is likely to expand and sharpen in Trump’s second year ahead.
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