Five things to know about Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei

The U.S. achieved a quick victory when its first strikes on Iran killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader for nearly 37 years.

But news that the country had appointed Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as his successor, along with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, sent oil prices skyrocketing above $120 per barrel on Monday, their highest levels since 2022.

“The Iranians are showing defiance by choosing the son of Khamenei,” Michael Herzog, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., told CNBC on Tuesday. He added it showed there was “continuity, and the guy will probably be vengeful.”

U.S. President Donald Trump expressed his “disappointment” in the new supreme leader’s selection, telling Fox News: “I don’t believe he can live in peace.”

The country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, told CNBC on Monday the country would unite around Mojtaba Khameini when asked about schisms in the country’s leadership.

The 56-year-old inherits the job of leading a country of over 90 million people in a war that has engulfed the Middle East.

Here are five things to know about him.

The son joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s most elite military institution, in the late 1980s, serving in the final years of the 1980-88 Iran‑Iraq war, a period that shaped his ties to Iran’s security elite.

After the war, Mojtaba Khamenei studied under prominent clerics in Qom. Despite years in the system, he does not hold a traditional religious rank.

He strengthened his connections with Iran’s clerical establishment and consolidated his position within conservative and hardline political networks through his marriage to Zahra Haddad Adel, the daughter of a senior conservative politician.

For decades, Mojtaba Khameini operated quietly in his father’s office, cultivating influence across the IRGC. Through his decades‑long entrenchment within Iran’s institutions, by many accounts stronger than his father’s in his own early rule, has shaped his reputation as a more hardline figure.

Mojtaba Khamenei has been identified as one of the leaders overseeing the 2009 Green Movement crackdown, when security forces brutally suppressed protestors who opposed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being declared the winner of the election, the largest demonstrations at that point since the revolution in 1979.