Oil Executives Cashed Out $400 Million Since the Iran War Began. Who Picks Up the Tab?

Oil and gas executives have sold nearly $400 million of their own company stock since the Iran war started. The ConocoPhillips CEO alone sold $80 million in two separate transactions in March. Another executive sold just over $11 million one day before his company's stock hit an all-time high. Crude jumped from $65 a barrel before the war to over $100 as the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply, closed and reopened and closed again. Mike and Neal break down what these sales actually signal. Executives sit on more information than anyone else in the market, and dumping shares at the peak is a tell, not just portfolio rebalancing. The two walk through how CEO pay shifted toward stock and options starting in the nineties to align incentives with company value, and why cashing out that equity while still running the company undercuts the entire point of the arrangement. Mike argues executives shouldn't be able to sell at all until they leave the company. Neal isn't ready to go that far but agrees the optics are bad. The debate that follows is about risk versus reward. Democrats are pushing a windfall tax on war profits with zero Republican support. Mike uses the Texas ERCOT electricity market as a counterexample, where the chance of a huge payout during a crunch drives real investment in resilience. The through line: reward should track risk, and oil majors that have been around for decades aren't exactly taking on new risk to earn this windfall. Mike floats a different idea, a national security tax tied specifically to oil price spikes caused by conflict, arguing that if the military is footing the bill to keep shipping lanes open, the companies profiting from that protection should help fund it. Neal ties it back to building Heirloom, where he thinks constantly about how equity incentives are supposed to work, and the gap between that theory and what oil executives just did with their own shares. Goods, bads, and others: Mike highlights a push to hold drone and strike operators legally accountable for unlawful killings, and calls out the tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke as a betrayal of an ally that showed up for American wildfires. Neal defends the Blue Angels pilot who buzzed a crowd low and fast, Mike disagrees hard, and both flag the mounting off-balance-sheet debt behind the AI data center buildout as a risk worth watching closely. Got a take? Email us: [hardpoints.show@gmail.com](mailto:hardpoints.show@gmail.com)