Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous War Profiteers

The mockumentary “Lords of War” shows how Pentagon money gets funneled into $20-million-plus paydays for weapons company CEOs — and their lavish lifestyles.

Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute and co-author of “The Trillion Dollar War Machine.”

This article and video are being co-published with Responsible Statecraft.

For the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion, and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.

Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.

While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in appalling housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.

The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.

“Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.

As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.

“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon

Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.

The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to........

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