As much of the global public holds out cautious optimism that a potential ceasefire could bring the US-backed Israeli-Iran conflict to an end, a new analysis from anti-poverty organization Oxfam International shines a stark light on who has profited from months of market disruption and violence: the world’s wealthiest energy industry elites. The report, released Monday as G7 leaders gather for a summit in France, details how just 41 top energy barons from G7 nations have seen their collective net worth surge by $23.5 billion since the conflict launched in late February.
The disruption of global oil markets sparked by the war triggered a dramatic spike in global fuel prices, sending rippling inflation through every corner of the world economy and stretching household budgets thin for working and low-income people across every continent. A separate April 2025 report from the United Nations Development Programme projects the economic fallout from the conflict will push an additional 32 million people into extreme poverty by the end of 2026.
Oxfam’s analysis draws from Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire List data to track wealth gains between March 1 and May 18, 2026. Across the seven G7 nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the sampled energy billionaires added an average of $300 million to their combined wealth every single day throughout the period of conflict.
“Conflict devastates countries and costs countless lives, yet for some it is extraordinarily profitable,” said Amitabh Behar, Executive Director of Oxfam International, in a statement accompanying the report. “This is a brutal system that redistributes wealth upwards — from workers to shareholders, from the poorest to the richest, from those with the least power to those who already have far too much of it. While families are skipping meals and governments slash life-saving aid, we are witnessing a grotesque billionaire bonanza.”
While the report acknowledges that wartime market volatility is not the sole driver of these billionaires’ growing fortunes, it underscores just how disproportionately energy giants have benefited: the “Big Six” global oil majors—Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies—are now projected to post full-year profits 80% higher than pre-conflict forecasts, compared to an average 8% profit growth projection for other large G7 firms included in the sample.
Between March and mid-May 2026, global billionaires overall saw an average 0.42% increase in their total wealth. By comparison, G7 energy billionaires recorded a 9% jump in wealth, with oil and gas billionaires specifically seeing an almost 11% rise. Oxfam emphasizes that the Iran conflict has only amplified the already gaping global inequality gap, a trend heavily driven by policy choices from G7 nations.
Since 2020, total billionaire wealth globally has surged by nearly $10 trillion. Over the same period, G7 nations—led by the United States under former President Donald Trump’s current administration—have cut total aid to the world’s poorest countries by $48 billion. That $48 billion cut equals exactly the amount that G7 energy billionaires have added to their own fortunes in just nine days of the conflict. Since France last hosted the G7 summit in 2019, Oxfam estimates that an average of 44 additional people per minute have fallen into need of humanitarian aid, based on 2025 data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The report also calls out French President Emmanuel Macron for sidelining contentious topics to secure U.S. participation in this week’s G7 summit. According to Behar, Macron has chosen to table any discussions that could anger Trump, including the catastrophic human and economic cost of the U.S.-backed Iran war, the ongoing Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, and action on the climate crisis, which Trump has repeatedly labeled “a scam.”
“Rather than defending collective governance, Macron and his peers are accommodating its destruction. This will have consequences measured in lives,” Behar said.
In response to these trends, Oxfam is calling on the “G6” — all G7 member states excluding the United States — to advance a concrete, comprehensive plan to shield vulnerable populations from economic turmoil stemming from the Iran conflict and overlapping global crises. Behar pushed back against claims that the G6 cannot act without U.S. buy-in, noting that member states have the power to cancel unsustainable debt for low-income nations, implement taxes on windfall energy profits and extreme wealth, and increase life-saving aid to poor countries.
“The G6 can’t plead powerlessness,” Behar added. “They can cancel debt. They can tax windfall profits and extreme wealth… They can provide poorer countries with aid. Refusing to act simply because Washington will not join them is not diplomacy—it is cowardice. And it will only accelerate the G6’s slide into global irrelevance.”