Good morning. As President Donald Trump has initiated tariff wars and threatened individual companies, his second term has been marked by pilgrimages of CEOs from Big Tech and beyond to bestow gifts upon POTUS and perform public acts of praise.
Many oil executives took their turn Friday when they were called to the White House to discuss investing billions of dollars in revitalizing the dilapidated Venezuelan industry. But Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods politely poured cold water on Trump’s preferred expediency, calling Venezuela “uninvestable” until a prolonged period of reforms can be enacted.
A clearly miffed Trump on Sunday called Exxon “too cute,” and he said he’s inclined to keep the world’s largest Big Oil giant out of Venezuela.
Woods, an Exxon lifer who succeeded Rex Tillerson as CEO in 2017 when his boss went to work for Trump, is a reserved but strong-spoken chief who has emerged as an unofficial industry spokesman.
Woods is a believer in the famed, disciplined ‘Exxon way.’ He’s always cordial but blunt. He’ll tell you Exxon won’t invest in renewables—Exxon is about molecules, not electrons—and that Exxon shouldn’t be blamed for climate change.
And he’s not going to appease the president by upsetting Exxon shareholders—an ongoing conundrum for the business leaders. Energy analysts said Exxon stock likely would have suffered if Exxon overcommitted to spending billions in Venezuela in its current, uneconomic state. Exxon’s stock ticked down only slightly by 0.5% on Monday—despite Trump’s critical words—and maintained a market cap of about $529 billion.
“There was nobody to say anything, except Darren, and he’s eloquent as heck,” said Jim Wicklund, veteran oil analyst and managing director for PPHB energy investment firm.
Sometimes it comes down to who has the most leverage.
“This is Trump’s problem. There’s no urgency by the industry at all to go back into Venezuela. And there’s almost no inducement other than guaranteeing profitability, which they can’t do,” Wicklund said. “You can sweeten the terms, but the political risk outweighs that variable by a factor of 10.”—Jordan Blum
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
Top news
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Target’s ICE problem
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Meta’s new AI infrastructure initiative
Meta is launching a new initiative called Meta Compute to build out AI infrastructure. Two new hires will help oversee the effort. Daniel Gross, who previously co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever, will colead the project, and Wall Street veteran and former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick will help broker agreements with governments to finance and deploy data centers globally.
A mysterious productivity surge
U.S. productivity surged in the third quarter, according to a Morgan Stanley report last week. That’s usually an indicator of non-inflationary economic growth, but analysts aren’t exactly sure what’s causing it.
Maduro bets spark insider training concerns
An anonymous user on prediction markets platform Polymarket made more than $400,000 betting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would leave office, with the bulk of the wagers placed shortly before the announcement of his capture. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D—NY), who last week introduced a bill that would limit government employees’ betting on Polymarket, told Fortune that the use of prediction platforms by federal workers is “corrupting the government itself.”
Paramount Skydance’s new fight for Warner Bros.
Paramount Skydance on Monday launched two new efforts to disrupt Warner Bros. Discovery’s planned sale to Netflix: nominating its own candidates for election to Warner Bros. board and suing the company to reveal details about the Netflix deal. Warner Bros. rejected a revised hostile acquisition bid by Paramount last week.
Craigslist nostalgia
Craigslist, the decades-old online classifieds site, is still the go-to platform for some Millennials who are nostalgic for the earnestness of the early web. Craigslist does not use algorithms to track users’ activity or guess their next move; it also doesn’t support ratings, “shares” or “likes” that foster clout-chasing, leaving Wired to wonder if it’s the “last real place on the internet.”
The markets
S&P 500 futures were down 0.13% this morning. The last session closed up 0.16%. STOXX Europe 600 was flat in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up o.o5% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 3.1%. China’s CSI 300 was down o.6%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 1.47%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.25%. Bitcoin was at $92K.
Around the watercooler
U.K. investigation into X over allegedly illegal deepfakes risks igniting a free speech battle with the U.S. by Beatrice Nolan
Americans making more than $100,000 are quickly losing faith in the economy—and it’s a red flag for the white-collar job market by Tristan Bove
‘Godfather of AI’ says the technology will create massive unemployment and send profits soaring — ‘that is the capitalist system’ by Jason Ma
Former New York Mayor Eric Adams has a new act as a crypto entrepreneur—though details of his “NYC Token” remain vague by Leo Schwartz and Ben Weiss
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
