Chris Wright
Net Worth: $170 Million (Bloomberg)
- Chris Wright is Trump’s centimillionaire Secretary of Energy. He made his money as CEO of Liberty Energy, an oil and gas company. He donated over $225,000 to Trump’s joint inaugural committee in 2024.
- Liberty Energy and its subsidiaries have been repeatedly fined for health and safety violations. The company was fined over $14,000 in March 2022 for an OSHA violation that killed an employee at an Exxon worksite. Just a bit earlier in the year, it had been fined $35,000 for an OSHA violation that led to an employee breaking their bones after being struck by a crane and falling 13 feet. In 2023, the company was fined a total of $14,000 for three OSHA violations, including a failure to protect employees from chemical hazards.
- Before joining the administration, Wright was on the board of small modular nuclear reactor company Oklo, which has received grants from the Department of Energy and depends on DoE permit approvals for its business plan, potentially constituting a conflict of interest. Shares of the company jumped 15% following the news that Wright had been selected as Secretary of Energy.
- Wright has publicly downplayed the climate crisis. He once compared climate science to eugenics, and he drank fracking fluid on video to undermine the idea that fracking poses public health risks. He has said that “there is no climate crisis” and called climate change “the new North Star of leftism” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.