The winners/losers of Voldemort's Big Beautiful Bill!

Generally, there's a lot to like below. Tons of stuff to stimulate manufacturing and investment in plant/equipment. Stimulating US production of Oil/Natural Gas, which will be critical as our demand for electricity is expected to ramp hard. Plus it's a potent geo-political weapon. Love the provisions to fire up our ability to produce complex computer chips. More help for school choice? Fabulous.

And the losers? EV cars. Really? Taxpayers should subsidize the rich to purchase something that's quickly losing market appeal. The same goes for wind and solar. The Federales would be much smarter supporting nuclear power.

As for the elite schools that turn out woke progressive dillentants! Bravo...f-ck them. Either turn out a balanced narrative with diverse views or get off the government's nipple.

Yes, people rightfully are concerned about a reduction in Medicaid funding, but the program is massive (showing out of control growth) and along with Social Security and Medicare, represents almost half the federal budget. It needs reform.

Not saying I love everything in the bill. But the stuff below...generally prudent.

The Corporate Winners and Losers in Trump’s Big Tax Bill

Oil drillers win access to public lands and manufacturers get tax breaks, while elite universities face new endowment taxes and solar projects lose tax credits

By WSJ Staff

Updated July 3, 2025 3:17 pm ET

Aerial view of oil storage tanks.

Oil storage tanks in Sealy, Texas. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

The final version of President Trump’s hallmark tax-and-spend legislation delivers significant tax advantages to some industries while rescinding them for others.

While Medicaid and state-and-local-tax deductions, known as SALT, have received a lot of attention, the tax law will impact a broad array of sectors.

Fossil-fuel companies

Oil-and-gas lobbyists have called the legislation a home run. It mandates new lease sales on public land and in federal waters in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Western states. Lower royalty rates are reinstated and the bill augments subsidies for projects that capture carbon and use it to recover more oil. Oil-and-gas producers will also be able to deduct certain drilling and development costs, a carve-out from the corporate alternative minimum tax.—Benoît Morenne

Silicon Valley investors

The Qualified Small Business Stock tax exclusion is being expanded to allow investors in startups to sell even more of their holdings early without paying capital-gains taxes. The new bill raises the per-issuer cap on eligible gains to $15 million, from $10 million, and lets investors reap the benefits while holding shares for shorter periods of time.—Isabella Simonetti

Chipmakers

Tax credits for semiconductor manufacturers that break ground on new plants in the U.S. will increase to 35% from 25%, part of the federal government’s effort to boost domestic production of the technology driving the AI revolution. Projects must start before the end of 2026. Beneficiaries could include companies like Intel and Micron if they expand their manufacturing footprints in the U.S.—Melissa Korn

Defense contractors

The Pentagon will budget about $150 billion over five years on big-ticket projects like ships, munitions production and missile-defense systems, including a roughly $25 billion down payment on the planned Golden Dome antimissile shield. That could be a boon for companies like Lockheed Martin and Palantir Technologies.—Drew FitzGerald

Airlines

The legislation includes $12.5 billion to overhaul the nation’s air-traffic-control system. Airline chief executives have rallied around the plan, saying that antiquated facilities and equipment contribute to delays. Industry groups have praised the legislation as a down payment, but said that fully modernizing the system requires billions more in funding.—Alison Sider

School choice

The legislation provides a big win for private schools and conservative school-choice activists through a new and generous tax credit. Taxpayers may now redirect up to $1,700 of their tax bill to organizations that issue stipends to help students attend private schools. States would have to opt into the program, though, which could set up fights in places where private-school vouchers have been rejected by voters or legislators.—Matt Barnum

Sports-team owners

Sports-team owners averted a potential financial hit after the Senate cut from its version of the spending bill a provision addressing deductions for intangible assets. The proposal would have limited their ability to deduct costs like player salaries and media-rights deals. Opponents of the proposal said it also would have depressed franchise sale valuations.—Isabella Simonetti

Private equity

Trump had asked Congress to raise taxes on carried interest income, but that isn’t in the legislation. Carried interest is what private-equity managers receive when certain investments are sold for a profit. Under current rules, carried interest on investments held at least three years can qualify for lower tax rates applied to long-term capital-gains, well below those applied to ordinary income. Critics of the current system say carried interest is more like compensation for labor than capital gains from an initial investment.—Miriam Gottfried and Richard Rubin

Manufacturers

Companies will receive an array of tax breaks meant to spur domestic manufacturing. They can fully expense the cost of building a factory as long as construction starts after Jan. 19, 2025—the day before Trump’s inauguration—and goes into service before 2031. The bill offers more permanent and faster writeoffs for the cost of equipment and research and development.—John Keilman

Real-Estate developers

The bill preserves and expands existing tax breaks for commercial real-estate investors and developers. Among them is “bonus depreciation,” a feature of the 2017 tax cuts, which will allow property firms to deduct 100% of many property-improvement expenses.

The bill also makes investments in tax-deferred “Opportunity Zones” for real-estate developments a permanent part of the tax code and maintains a 2017 tax deduction for pass-through entities, such as LLCs, that are widely used to own and manage commercial real estate. Affordable housing construction should also get a boost. The bill provides a 12% expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, a program that has funded the development of about 50,000 new housing units a year.—Will Parker

Private-student lenders

Private-student lenders like SoFi stand to benefit from lowered federal student-loan caps. New caps will lower federal borrowing to $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for professional programs, such as medical school, down from caps of $138,500 for most grad students and $224,000 for certain health programs. Lower caps could push more students toward private lenders to fill the gap.—Dalvin Brown

Retailers

Retailers will be among the biggest beneficiaries from the bill’s preserving of the current 21% corporate income-tax rate. Before a 2017 bill lowered the rate from 35%, retailers paid among the highest effective tax rates. Companies like Macy’s and Kohl’s operate mostly in the U.S. and spend little on manufacturing and R&D, so they claim few deductions on these activities. The preservation of the 2017 tax-rate cut offers a spot of good news for an industry facing increased costs from the Trump administration’s trade war.—Haley Zimmerman

LOSERS

AI and tech companies

A provision that would have placed a 10-year moratorium—later cut to five years—on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence was stripped from the bill earlier this week. Tech leaders had lobbied for the ban, arguing the need to comply with a patchwork of state rules would limit innovation in the high-stakes AI race.—Melissa Korn

Electric vehicles

The bill will quickly end subsidies of up to $7,500 for purchasing or leasing an electric vehicle, denying the credit for purchases after Sept. 30. That poses a challenge for automakers—from Tesla and Ford to BMW and Hyundai—that are already struggling to sell EVs in the U.S., where they have stalled at about 8% of the new-car market. An earlier version of the bill had kept subsidies for EVs in place into 2026.—Christopher Otts

Solar and wind

After a 12-month runway to start new renewable energy projects, developers won’t qualify for special tax credits. U.S. factories that make renewable equipment, such as solar panels, should see a short-term bump in orders as developers try to beat the clock. Beyond that, they are worried customers will simply buy from China instead.—Jennifer Hiller

Shippers and online retailers

Direct-to-consumer brands like Sézane apparel and Diadora sneakers could be hit by a provision ending the de minimis rule that currently allows packages worth $800 or less to be imported duty-free from countries other than China and Hong Kong. FedEx, UPS, DHL, cargo airlines and passenger airlines that have in recent years benefited from a boom from ferrying e-commerce packages could see a pull-back in parcel volume if increased costs diminish consumer demand. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it processed four million de minimis packages a day in 2024.—Esther Fung

Food companies

Cuts to the nation’s food stamp program, or SNAP, would be bad news for packaged-food companies. Big food companies especially rely on spending from SNAP recipients, and many have cited 2023 cuts to the program as a contributor to lower sales volumes. Bernstein analysts estimate that SNAP recipients account for nearly 9% of grocery spending on food and that Kraft Heinz, General Mills and J.M. Smucker could see the biggest hit from program cuts.—Jesse Newman

Universities

The bill proposes taxing private college and universities’ annual investment income at 8%, 4% and 1.4% depending on their level of wealth. The current endowment tax is 1.4%.

Small colleges with less than 3,000 tuition-paying students were winners, gaining an exemption. Caltech and small liberal-arts schools with endowments north of $1 billion, such as Grinnell College and Bowdoin College, are expected to benefit.

The biggest losers are expected to be Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the schools are expected to pay 8%. About 10 other research universities also are expected to pay a tax under the plan.—Juliet Chung

Hospitals

The bill reduces the power of states to boost Medicaid payments to hospitals.

States have increasingly imposed taxes on hospitals to trigger Medicaid matching funds from the federal government. Hospitals would typically balk at such levies, but in this case hospitals typically get back more money than they pay out in the form of higher payment rates.

The megabill reduces the maximum tax rate from 6% of hospitals’ net patient revenue to 3.5% in the 40 states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Nonexpansion states will have their state “provider taxes” frozen in place at the time the bill is signed.—Joseph Walker

This explanatory article may be periodically updated.

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