It's earnings week, and the war is paying out. Saudi Aramco reported $33.4 billion in quarterly profit on Tuesday, up 33%. ExxonMobil's profit more than doubled to $14.5 billion. Chevron quadrupled to $12.1 billion. Shell booked its second-highest quarter ever, near $10 billion. BP's profit more than doubled too. All of it while the Strait of Hormuz is squeezed shut and crews are literally abandoning ship mid-crossing. * Here's CNN's headline over those numbers: "Oil companies are making a fortune from the US-Iran war. That's a problem for Trump." * Read it twice and check the ownership of each noun. The fortune: theirs. The war: everyone's. The problem: Trump's. Five companies just made roughly $75 billion in three months off a conflict, and the injured party in the headline is one man's political positioning. * The article itself — a sharp analysis, all the numbers present and correct — runs on Trump's reaction like a spine. "They're making too much money," he says from the Oval Office. "I'll say it loud and clear. I'm not happy about it." The most powerful man on earth gets cast as the angry customer, and the story becomes about how he'll manage his mood. * The funny part is that CNN's own copy remembers a different vocabulary. It notes that back in 2022, Biden accused energy producers of "war profiteering" and floated a windfall tax. Track the drift: in 2022, record wartime profits were a thing companies do — an accusation with a name. In 2026, they're a thing a president has — a headache. Same behavior, new filing cabinet. * The same morning, the Guardian pointed the identical story at a different protagonist: "Calls for UK bank tax to fund cost of living help as HSBC profits hit £7.5bn," next to "BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices soaring." In that framing the money is connected to something: your heating bill, your tank of petrol, the people the windfall could help. * Al Jazeera, for its part, just asked the mechanism out loud: "Why are oil companies posting record profits amid Iran war disruption?" Not thrilling either. But it's the question a reader actually has. * Framing decides who the protagonist of an economics story is. In the Guardian's version, you're in the story — you're at the pump. In CNN's version, you're in the audience, watching a president handle an optics issue. A war that closes a strait is bad for nearly everyone touching it; earnings week is when you find out exactly who "nearly" excludes. And a headline that files $75 billion of war profit under one man's political headache has quietly told you whose problem money isn't.