Stephen Feinberg
Net Worth: $5 Billion (Forbes, 3/16/26)
Who is Stephen Feinberg?
- Stephen Feinberg is the co-founder and former CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, a major private equity firm that is no stranger to controversy. With about $65 billion in asset holdings, Cerberus’s investment portfolio is wide-ranging. It includes defense sector outfits like Navistar Defense, which paid $50 million to settle allegations of fraudulently inducing the U.S. Marine Corps into contracting for an armored vehicle suspension system at inflated prices, and TransDigm, which reportedly turned in excess profits of $20.8 million on spare parts contracts with the Department of Defense due to price gouging. These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. According to a New York Times investigation, Tier 1 Group, a Cerberus subsidiary, trained the Saudi assassins behind the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi under a contract approved by the State Department. What is more, DynCorp, a military contractor owned by Cerberus from 2010 to 2020, infamously trained U.S.-backed fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia and reportedly supplied planes for Latin American drug wars. Cerberus also paid north of $8.7 million to resolve claims of defrauding the federal government over contract work in Iraq. With scandals like these, Feinberg’s company seems aptly named after the Greek mythological guardian of the gates of hell.
- Aside from its close ties to the military industrial complex, Feinberg’s Cerberus has faced heat for allegedly looting a struggling hospital system. In 2010, Cerberus purchased Massachusetts’ Caritas Christi, a money-troubled multi-state hospital chain, which it rebranded as Steward Health Care. A decade later, Cerberus pulled out its investment in Steward—but not before amassing $800 million in the process while leaving Steward saddled with billions in debt. Crushed by the weight of its financial liabilities, Steward filed for bankruptcy, resulting in several hospital closures.
- The mismanagement of Steward had a devastating impact on patient care. According to a 2024 report on Steward prepared by Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), Steward patients spent much more time in emergency rooms, were more likely to leave the emergency room before receiving medical attention, and experienced higher death rates, compared to the national average.
- This legacy of alleged patient neglect continues to haunt Steward post-bankruptcy. For example, the now-inoperative Insight Hospital & Medical Center Trumbull in Ohio was criticized for violations related to water management plans that monitor for waterborne pathogens and heat and boiler issues as well as patient care problems stemming from at least one complaint involving a stroke patient who waited two hours in an emergency room before being transferred to a different facility, endangering the narrow window of time in which proper medication could be administered. Another one of Steward’s shuttered locations includes Carney Hospital in Dorchester, Massachusetts, which has resulted in a “health care desert” for patients. “I don’t know what I’m going to do….I have nowhere else to go,” elderly patient Sonia Lyle told the Boston Globe newspaper. “This is the only community hospital around here. The ambulance takes you here if you get sick. And people like me, older people like me, what am I, what they’re going to do?” Similar concerns were voiced in the wake of Steward-owned hospital closures elsewhere in Massachusetts and Florida, for instance.
- Additionally, Cerberus has been under fire for propping up and glamorizing the U.S. gun industry. In 2007, Cerberus purchased Remington Arms, the manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle used by Adam Lanza to massacre twenty-six students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. An ensuing lawsuit that saw Remington agree to pay $73 million to the families of those killed zeroed in on Cerberus’s aggressive marketing campaign of AR-15s, which resulted in a twenty-fold increase of sales over a seven-year period.
- And in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis largely attributed to shadow banks (financial institutions like Cerberus that offer loans and credit untouched by the regulations applicable to traditional banking), Cerberus-controlled Chrysler and GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors, received $22.6 billion in government bailouts. Chrysler ultimately went bankrupt, while Cerberus stepped away unscathed.
- Since 2006, Cerberus has owned grocery company, Albertsons, which has been accused of using inflation as a cover to jack up consumer prices and increase profit margins. Tellingly, in 2022, shortly after unveiling a proposed merger with Kroger, Albertsons announced a $4 billion dividend payout to investors, with $1 billion earmarked for Cerberus, at the same time that food prices were skyrocketing.
- After Trump secured the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Feinberg quickly lent his support. He and his wife collectively donated roughly $2.2 million to Rebuilding America Now (a pro-Trump super-PAC) and Trump Victory (a joint Republican fundraising committee) and co-hosted a $50,000-a-plate Trump fundraiser at an upscale New York restaurant in June 2016. Prior to the November 2016 election, Feinberg also sat on the Trump Economic Advisory Council.
- During Trump’s first presidential term, Feinberg was tapped to head the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), a role he held while continuing to serve as CEO of Cerberus. Tasked with the responsibility of advising Trump on the performance of U.S. intelligence, Feinberg was privy to copious amounts of briefings on the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury as well as the FBI and other intelligence agencies. Well before Feinberg’s 2018 appointment to the PIAB, Bloomberg reported on his network of national security connections through Cerberus, and the New Yorker magazine identified potential conflicts of interest with him assuming an intelligence role in the Trump administration, which evidently fell on silent ears.
- In the 2020 presidential election, Feinberg again backed Trump, this time contributing $725,000 to the Trump Victory committee along with his wife. He also gave $1 million to America First Action, the pro-Trump super-PAC affiliated with America First Works, a “dark money” group that funneled funds to groups (Event Strategies Inc. and Women for America First) pivotal in organizing Trump’s January 6, 2021 rally.
- New details (and questions) about Feinberg and Cerberus have arisen in the era of Trump 2.0. Epstein files released by the Department of Justice in 2026 name Feinberg in at least 20 documents and mention Cerberus in 360 documents. Although their connection to Epstein remains unclear, whistleblower emails contained in the files allege “massive fraud” by Feinberg and Cerberus with the SEC’s blessing as well as money laundering allegations, according to a Project On Government Oversight investigation.
How is Stephen Feinberg benefiting from the Trump administration?
- After Trump clinched his victory in the 2024 presidential election, he selected Feinberg to be his deputy Secretary of Defense (the No. 2 Pentagon official). His nomination was confirmed by the Senate in a 59-40 vote, despite glaring conflicts of interest. In this capacity, he acts as the Defense Department’s chief operating officer, overseeing daily business activities, managing the defense budget, and implementing the defense secretary’s priorities. Financial disclosures filed by Feinberg list his minimum assets as worth $2 billion, making him the wealthiest official in the Trump administration. Feinberg claims to have divested from Cerberus and its affiliated entities, but his ethics paperwork contains a unique clause allowing him to indefinitely contract with Cerberus for accounting, health care coverage, and tax-related purposes. Indeed, his 2026 ethics filings reveal that Feinberg continues to be financially tied to Cerberus through a contract for such administrative services. Additionally, Feinberg stated that his divestiture of interests from Cerberus may include gifts to irrevocable trusts benefiting his adult children. Notably, many of his defense investments already fund a family trust.
- The Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency, which Feinberg oversees, has awarded contracts to at least four Cerberus-related firms for the $151 billion Golden Dome for America missile interception project. Those firms are: NetCentrics Corp, North Wind, Red River Technology, and Stratolaunch.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.