Cover image: upper left: Peter Theil; upper right: Stephen Schwarzman; bottom: Charles Koch
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed into law on July 4, 2025, is an unfiltered gift to the billionaire class. It preserves and expands the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that stuffed billionaire pockets and supercharged stock buybacks for shareholders and corporate executives. The 2025 bill deepens this massive wealth transfer from workers to corporate elites, from the poor to the super-rich, by effectively slashing billions in vital services and regulatory protections to bankroll handouts and tax cuts for billionaires.
If tax and spending bills are political and ethical documents, then this mega-bill is clear in its values: it is an acceleration of the corporate elite’s long class war against poor and working-class people that contains new levels of cruelty. It’s not merely that millions of the most vulnerable people will lose access to basic needs like healthcare and food assistance, but that their losses will pay for further tax cuts for billionaires and lavish new contracts for weapons companies and detention and deportation profiteers.
While various analyses have divvied up corporate “winners” and “losers” from the OBBBA, the truth is that it’s a major win for the ruling class as a whole. The Chamber of Commerce, which speaks for the upper echelons of the collective corporate class, effusively praised what it called the “historic legislation.”
Nevertheless, there are some clear corporate and billionaire blocs that will especially benefit from the new mega-bill. From private equity to fossil fuels, and from defense contractors to real estate developers, this post maps out some of the biggest winners.
Private Equity
Private equity firms, and the billionaire barons who oversee them, were big winners from the OBBBA.
Perhaps most notably, private equity executives retained their cherished carried tax interest loophole. Because of this loophole, private equity investment gains can qualify as “carried interest” that are taxed at just over half of the normal top corporate tax rate.
In effect, this loophole amounts to a massive subsidy for private equity billionaires, who can further stack their wealth through avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.
Stephen Schwarzman, the ultra-wealthy head of private equity giant Blackstone, once compared Barack Obama’s support for raising the carried interest tax rate to Hitler invading Poland. While Donald Trump said during both his first and current presidential terms that he supposedly wanted to close the carried interest tax loophole, it was preserved in both his 2017 and 2025 tax codes (the loophole also survived the Biden administration).
Private equity won out from the OBBBA in other ways. As the Financial Times noted, many private equity-backed companies will enjoy lower tax rates through the “enshrining [of] tax deductions for interest on debt and expanding them to include depreciation and amortisation.”
This is critical because private equity’s business model relies heavily on loading up their portfolio companies with large amounts of debt that private equity firms take out to purchase those companies.
The OBBBA also includes huge cuts to the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key government regulatory agency that Wall Street often considers an adversary.
Some of the private equity and hedge fund billionaires who stand to benefit from the OBBBA include major GOP donors like Blackstone’s Schwarzman (worth $48.5 billion), Citadel’s Kenneth Griffin (worth $46.6 billion), Elliott Management’s Paul Singer (worth $6.2 billion), and others.
Wall Street is well-represented at the heights of the current administration, with both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent coming out of Wall Street.
As one former US Treasury official-turned-consultant told the Financial Times, “[i]f you are sitting in a private assets seat, this is a very good bill for you.”
Fossil Fuels
Oil, gas and coal profiteers also benefit significantly from the OBBBA.
As energy journalist Antonia Juhasz points out in the Rolling Stone, one major win for fossil fuels is a new carveout allowing oil and gas companies to avoid the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax that was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which made companies with over $1 billion in profits pay a minimum 15 percent tax rate. Moreover, new industry tax breaks amount to a $1.1 billion gift to the fossil fuel industry
Juhasz also notes that the new mega-bill “weakens Biden’s methane rules by rescinding all unobligated funding provided to the Environmental Protection Agency for financial and technical assistance for methane monitoring and mitigation,” while also pushing back for a decade a fee to be charged against excessive methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The Financial Times notes that the coal industry, one of the dirtiest fossil fuel emitters, is also a winner from the OBBBA, with producers of metallurgical coal now “able to claim back 2.5 per cent of their costs against their taxes until 2029.”
The bill also mandates new lease sales on public land and in federal waters, from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska to other western states, all now with lower royalty rates, cut by around 25 percent, costing around $6 billion over the next decade.
Oil and gas companies also will enjoy a new $14.2 billion “handout” toward developing carbon capture technologies aimed at boosting oil production. The bill also further weakens environmental regulation and cuts investment and tax breaks and incentives for electric vehicles, solar panels and heat pumps.
“Oil-and-gas lobbyists have called the legislation a home run,” noted the Wall Street Journal, with one coal CEO adding that “We couldn’t be more appreciative of what Trump is doing.”
Oil and gas billionaires and big Trump donors like Harold Hamm of Continental Resources (worth $18.5 billion), Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer (worth $7.1 billion), and Jeffery Hildebrand of Hilcorp Energy (worth $7.8 billion) are among the members of the fossil fuel ruling class who stand to benefit from the OBBBA.
Weapons Industry
The military industry complex is alive and well, and it’s also a major winner from the OBBBA, which promises an additional $150 billion in military spending.
This huge boost to the defense budget will bring it to an astounding $1 trillion by 2026. Corporate war profiteers are set to enjoy continued lucrative government contracts under this new budget.
Broadly, there are two wings of the war industry that stand to benefit immensely. One wing is made up of the traditional industry “primes” like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and RTX (formerly Raytheon) who rake in huge contracts to produce tanks, submarines, aircraft, and major weapons systems, subcontracting out to smaller companies in the process.
These megacorporations will benefit from tens of billions of dollars channeled to fighter jets, the proposed “Golden Dome” (allotted $25 billion) and much more. With $60 billion going toward nuclear “modernization,” companies like Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and Fluor will also benefit.
Most of these defense giants are publicly-traded and owned by a collective shareholding billionaire and multimillionaire bloc made up of top executives and Wall Street firms, including asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Fidelity, and banks like JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.
A second (and ascending) wing is made up tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX that, as defense industry analyst William Hartung notes, are “cashing in on contracts for unpiloted vehicles, advanced communications systems, new-age goggles for the Army, anti-drone systems, and so much more.”
These tech firms are largely owned by billionaires like SpaceX’s Elon Musk (worth $405.3 billion), Palantir’s Peter Thiel (worth $22.5 billion), and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey (worth $3.6 billion).
While corporate war profiteers across the board benefit from the OBBBA, it’s worth noting that these two wings of the military-industrial complex may find themselves pitted against each other. “[E]ven as weapons spending hits near-record or record levels,” Hartung notes, “there may still be a fight between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms over who gets the biggest share of that budget.”
Manufacturers
Manufacturers encompass a huge swath of the corporate class, also overlapping with other industries, like defense production and fossil fuels, discussed in other sections in this post.
But it’s worth mentioning manufacturing as its own category, because this broad sector, and the billionaires and multimillionaires behind it, are also big winners from the OBBBA.
These include both privately-owned manufacturers — like Koch Industries and Cargill, both owned by two of the richest billionaire families in the world — as well as publicly-traded manufacturing corporations, ranging from Caterpillar and Boeing to General Electric and John Deere, that are largely owned by interlocked networks of Wall Street firms.
Manufacturers notched big gains in the mega-bill, snagging new tax breaks and tax credits. They can fully deduct the costs of building new factories that go into service by 2031, and they garnered bigger write-offs for research and development and equipment costs.
Sub-groups within manufacturing, such as semiconductor manufacturers, fared even better, with access to new tax credits.
Of course, manufacturing corporations will also benefit from lower tax rates for all corporations. While the current administration claims this will help spur investment that will lead to “job creation,” corporations engaged in massive stock buybacks to enrich their investors after the 2017 corporate tax cuts.
It’s no surprise that top manufacturing corporate lobbying groups, like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), strongly backed the bill. “This is a manufacturers’ bill — through and through,” said NAM’s president.
Developers
Developers — an industry whose ranks are dominated by a massive real estate and private equity firms led by billionaires and multimillionaires — were also major winners from the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Developers will benefit from preserved and expanded tax breaks. These include a continuation of the “bonus depreciation” from the 2017 tax code that allows developers to deduct 100% of expenses connected to “improving” properties. The new bill also preserves the 2017 tax deduction for LLCs and other “pass-through” entities often used by developers.
Moreover, the OBBBA makes “Opportunity Zones” and the tax-deferred investments in them permanent. Billionaire real estate magnates like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert have taken advantage of this tax break after it was first passed in 2017.
Developers like Stephen Ross (worth $18.4 billion) will benefit from measures like these, as will private equity behemoths like Blackstone that own huge swaths of real estate properties across the U.S.
All Billionaires are Winners
Various analyses are sifting out some of the “losers” from the OBBBA, such as AI and electric vehicle companies and retail.
But the truth should be clear: all billionaires and the ultra-wealthy benefit from the new mega-bill, just as they did from his 2017 bill.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates that, in 2026 alone the new tax and spending bill will amount to a $117 billion gift to the top-earning one percent of people in the US. The ITEP also found that the same top one percent will receive tax cuts “totaling $1.02 trillion over the next decade.”
New tax cuts and benefits for corporations come on top of general corporate tax cuts from the 2017 bill that they’ll continue to enjoy. From the 2017 tax cuts, for example, Juhasz found that “the reduced corporate tax rate alone resulted in a combined $25 billion bonanza for 17 American oil and gas companies,” with ExxonMobil getting “the highest single payout at nearly $6 billion.”
And to be sure, just as they did last time, many corporations will use these added profits to invest in stock buybacks that stuff investor and executive pockets.
All told, the OBBBA will channel tens of billions in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, paid for by massive cuts that will devastate poor and working people by slashing their access to everything from healthcare to food assistance.
Going forward, we are in the fight of our lives to preserve access to good wages, affordable healthcare and housing, clean communities, and other vital things we need to survive — and that fight is squarely against the billionaire class.