Decarbonisation will reshape global energy ownership, yet most assessments focus solely on stranded fossil assets and their direct operators, not the ultimate owners who bear economic exposure. Here, we link asset-level data for power plants, oil and gas fields, and coal mines, covering 170,000 TWh of yearly energy production, to a firm-to-firm equity network, and compute ultimate owners by recursively propagating equity stakes through corporate chains. We find a major shift: while specialised energy firms directly own assets responsible for 73% of global energy production, they retain only 34% at the ultimate ownership level, as governments rise from 1% to 19% and institutional investors from 2% to 20%. To quantify each ultimate owner’s exposure to climate policy, we project their portfolio to 2050 under current-policies and net-zero scenarios and report the difference in global production share as an exposure metric. Governments, despite holding only 19% of ultimate ownership, face the largest losses (–9.3~pp). Energy companies, despite being the largest owner category at 34%, show a net loss of only –2.4~pp, masking large gross exposures in both directions. Furthermore, firm-level exposure is strongly bimodal, dominated by extreme winners and losers. These results locate transition risk and opportunity on sovereign balance sheets and in institutional portfolios, not only within the energy sector.