Follow the Money: who profits from the Iran war?

**Sam Fenwick** (0:03)
The opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. 11 Wall Street, Lower Manhattan, 9.3 in the morning, March the 2nd, 2026
Most people on the floor had already seen the news. Hours earlier, US and Israeli forces had struck Iran. The missiles were still in the air when the market opened. The question wasn't what had happened, it was what it meant for the numbers on the screens dotted around the trading hall. In the hours that followed, a very specific group of people got very quietly, very significantly richer. I'm Sam Fenwick, this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. Today, we're following the money from the arms maker and dealer to the gas producer and the markets betting on it. As we speak, the US and Iran say they've reached a deal to end the war, but the money has already been made. So who made the most and where's it all gone?
Wars are expensive, but not for everyone. Since the strikes on Iran, we followed the money through four parts of the economy where conflict has generated enormous profits.
The arms makers replacing the weapons that are used, the energy companies filling the gap left by the closed Strait of Hormuz, the dealers supplying the Gulf States, and the prediction markets betting on the outcome. We start with weapons because in the first two months, the Iran War consumed US munitions at a pace American forces haven't seen since the Gulf War. When a country fires a missile, someone has to replace it at full contract price, often on an accelerated deal. That someone, in the case of the United States, is one of a handful of publicly traded American companies whose share price went up the morning the bombs fell. Mark Hansion is a retired US Marine Colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He's been tracking the cost of this war from the first few hours of the campaign.

**Mark Hansion** (2:08)
The cost is driven almost entirely by munitions. Our estimate is that the total cost is running 35 to 40 billion, but compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which went on for years at very high levels of intensity, those were costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

**Sam Fenwick** (2:28)
So 35 to 40 billion in the first two months. And the high intensity fighting only lasted 39 days.
In the first four days alone, the US-led coalition fired approximately more than 5,000 munitions across 35 different types. A replacement bill for munitions alone of somewhere between 10 and 16 billion dollars. The single most used weapon was the Tomahawk cruise missile.

**Mark Hansion** (2:55)
A Tomahawk missile is a long-range ground-attack munition that is precise, which means it will land within about 10 metres of where it's aimed at. Typically, they're fired from ships, and the range is up to 1,000 miles. And that's what makes it both expensive and very useful, because it means that the ship doesn't have to be very close to the target. Going into this conflict for Tomahawks, we had about 3,100, and we've used, I think, about 1,000. They cost 2.5 million dollars. Once Congress provides the money, then the Department of Defense can go out and spend it. It's the Navy that procures Tomahawks. The Navy will then go to the manufacturer, Raytheon, and they will sign a contract for Tomahawks. It takes a little time to work all of that out, but four months, I think, would be about right.

**Sam Fenwick** (3:49)
Raytheon, the manufacturer, is now running accelerated production lines, but according to CSIS, manufacturing lead time has increased from two to three years because demand has increased even faster. The ground attack Tomahawk costs 2.5 million dollars each, the ship attack version, the one fired from US Navy destroyers in the Gulf, costs nearly 5 million. The total Tomahawk spending has risen from around 250 million dollars a year in the early 2020s, to a proposed one billion dollars in the US defense budget for 2027
Now, part of the reason this bill is so large is the nature of the war itself. Iran has been launching Shahed drones. They cost around 30,000 dollars each. The US is shooting them down with Patriot interceptors, costing around 4 million dollars each. So between 2021 and 2025, the United States accounted for more than 40 percent of all global arms exports.
More than four times the share of the second largest supplier. Six of the top 10 arms companies in the world by revenue are American. Producer Matt Lines is here and he's going to tell us how some of those companies are doing.

**Matt Lines** (5:09)