More than two months after U.S.
The suggestion was that that both stocks stood to gain from the end of the Maduro regime.
Quiver Quantitative, an investment data platform that analyzes trades by politicians, made the claim on X on Jan. 19, 2026, two weeks after the U.S. strike on Venezuela (archived). Quiver Quantitative's post read:
BREAKING: We just caught some wild new trades.
Senator Markwayne Mullin bought up to $50K of stock in both Raytheon and Chevron just days before the US strike on Venezuela.
Mullin sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The claim then spread elsewhere on X, before gaining new life as Mullin went through the different stages of confirmation in the Senate.
On March 18, 2026, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing to confirm Mullin as DHS secretary. The next day, the committee voted to advance his nomination to the Senate floor. (The Senate voted to confirm him on March 23, meaning Mullin had to resign as a senator.) That day, a Facebook page relayed the claim (archived) that he bought Chevron shares days before U.S. forces entered Venezuela. The post read, in part:
Five days before Trump launched a military operation in Venezuela, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin quietly bought stock in Chevron — the ONLY major U.S. oil company operating there. Then the attack happens… and the stock surges.
Coincidence? Maybe. But here's the problem: Mullin sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, meaning he has access to sensitive national security briefings — and he's admitted he talks to Trump "all the time."
As we will outline below, the claim is true. Snopes also confirmed that Chevron was only one of at least four stocks Mullin acquired that stood to benefit from the U.S.' decision to strike Venezuela. We reached out to the former Oklahoma senator, now DHS secretary, asking how much he knew about the trades he made on Dec. 29, 2025, five days before the U.S. launched its operation to remove Maduro. We will update this story should we receive a response.
Chevron, ConocoPhillips, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Caterpillar
According to Capitol Trades — a database that compiles all of the trades elected officials make and declare — Mullin, who sat on the Senate's Armed Forces Committee, completed the purchase of
The Capitol Trades database does not specify how much of each stock Mullin bought, but it does say that each purchase was between $15,000 and $50,000. Therefore, it is correct to say that he "bought up to $50K of stock in both Raytheon [RTX] and Chevron."
It was not the first time Mullin had purchased shares in these companies. Capitol Trades' database shows he bought shares in each of them as early as Sept. 13, 2023.
Acquiring these stocks before the strike on Venezuela aroused suspicion because all four would presumably benefit from the U.S. obtaining control over the Latin American country.
In 2007, the regime of then-President Hugo Chávez ordered the seizure of oil fields and other assets that belonged to U.S. oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, Norway's Statoil and France's Total, unless they accepted to negotiate new terms with the government. This was the last step in the nationalization process of the oil industry in the country, which had started in 1976 under then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Though the sludge quality of Venezuela's oil makes it difficult to extract and refine, the country had the world's largest proven crude oil reserves in 2023 — according to a February 2024 report (Page 5) by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a government agency that provides official energy data and analysis — which have long attracted foreign investment.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused to negotiate and their operations and assets moved to state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Meanwhile, Chevron struck a deal with the Venezuelan government: it agreed to its condition to create joint ventures with PDVSA, of which the Venezuelan company owned at least 60%. Chevron accepted and, by 2026, it was producing a quarter of the oil in Venezuela. This gave the U.S. oil company a head start in the country, should the regime change.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips then spent years in legal battles with Venezuela's government for compensation. The World Bank's International Centre Settlement of Investment Disputes, which arbitrates international investment disagreements, awarded ExxonMobil $1.6 billion in 2014 and ConocoPhillips nearly $9 billion in 2019. Venezuela's dispute with ExxonMobil was ongoing as of 2025, and an attempt by Venezuela to annul the $9 billion award to ConocoPhillips failed in January 2025 when the tribunal upheld the 2019 decision. A regime change could increase the chances of ConocoPhillips receiving that amount in compensation and of the company resuming operations in the Latin American country.
Both Chevron and ConocoPhillips stocks rose after the U.S. strike on Venezuela, showing a clear spike on Jan. 5, 2026, the first day of trading after the operation.
RTX, a defense company that specializes in air, land and naval warfare, but also hypersonics, was among the stocks Mullin bought on Dec. 29. U.S. forces reportedly used RTX equipment during its operation in Venezuela. The company's stock had been edging up for months amid the rising intensity in U.S. military operations around the Caribbean, but it also spiked on Jan. 5.
Lastly, Caterpillar, whose valuation benefits from construction and reconstruction, also rallied on Jan. 5, 2025, and one analyst believed it would continue to rise as Venezuela rebuilt destroyed or obsolete infrastructure.
For more on Mullin, Snopes verified the claim that he once challenged a union boss to a fight during a Senate committee hearing.