Defense tech investors thought the war in Iran could make them millionaires. Instead, they faced a Wall Street bloodbath
The U.S. has racked up a $37.5 billion tab on the war in Iran following President Donald Trump’s launch of Operation Epic Fury in late February. Northrop Grumman is now down over 30%, L3Harris Technologies has fallen over 20%, and Lockheed Martin has declined nearly 13%. 49 on the Fortune 500—was at one point down about 18%, though the stock has since recovered to up 4% after the company reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings.
- ▪The U.S. has racked up a $37.5 billion tab on the war in Iran following President Donald Trump’s launch of Operation Epic Fury in late February.
- ▪Northrop Grumman is now down over 30%, L3Harris Technologies has fallen over 20%, and Lockheed Martin has declined nearly 13%.
- ▪49 on the Fortune 500—was at one point down about 18%, though the stock has since recovered to up 4% after the company reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings.
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| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/07/25/defense-tech-investors-thought-the-war-in-iran-could-make-them-millionaires-instead-they-faced-a-wall-street-bloodbath/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:54:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T10:22:09.735Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T10:22:09.735Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wINRKXpCx588 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The U.S. has racked up a $37.5 billion tab on the war in Iran following President Donald Trump’s launch of Operation Epic Fury in late February. Yet despite continued conflict and historic levels of defense spending requested by the Pentagon, investors betting on a defense windfall have watched many top contractors lose value.Recommended Video Trading volumes in major defense contractors surged in the conflict’s opening days—rising for some as much as 140% above their average level during Trump’s second term—but the gains didn’t last. Northrop Grumman is now down over 30%, L3Harris Technologies has fallen over 20%, and Lockheed Martin has declined nearly 13%. Raytheon Technologies (RTX)—No.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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