While most of Wall Street was busy backing away from oil, family offices were quietly leaning in. That call is now paying off, with the Iran war pushing crude prices up roughly 30% since late February and the family offices that built positions before the move sitting on big paper gains.
Since the pandemic, private equity firms and large institutional investors have largely backed away from oil and gas, mostly because of pressure from environmentally focused investors and ESG mandates, which are a set of rules many endowments and pension funds have to follow.
Family offices, the private firms that manage money for ultra-wealthy families, don't have those same constraints, so they can underwrite oil and gas deals on the numbers alone without answering to outside ESG committees.
That gap created an opening, and family offices stepped in to fund deals that bigger institutions wouldn't touch.
The result: Oil and gas deal flow stayed alive during the ESG retreat, but the capital backing it shifted toward a much smaller, less visible group of private buyers.
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The US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran on February 28, sending Brent crude past $100 a barrel at the peak and effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the shipping chokepoint that handles roughly a fifth of the world's oil.
Family offices that had been quietly accumulating oil exposure were suddenly holding what looked like one of the trades of the year.
Vicki Odette, who chairs the investment management practice at Haynes Boone, told CNBC that oil-price headlines have driven a wave of fresh queries from family offices looking to add even more exposure.
The Trump administration's push to prioritize oil, gas, and nuclear power over clean energy has added another layer of confidence for buyers, according to Ellen Conley, co-chair of Haynes Boone's energy finance practice.
The combination of a war-driven price spike and a friendlier policy backdrop is unusual, and it has made energy one of the most-discussed sectors inside family offices this year.
BlackRock's 2025 Global Family Office Report found that about three-quarters of family offices are bullish on infrastructure, a category that increasingly includes oil and gas pipelines, storage, and nuclear power generation.
The next test is what happens if Iran tensions ease and crude prices come back off the highs. Whether family offices hold their positions or trim from here will say a lot about how committed they really are.
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