Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Book review: Steve Coll's "Private Empire"

Posted: 30 Apr 2012 07:32 PM PDT
David Biello is associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American magazine.

So far in 2012, ExxonMobil has made $104 million a day -- and that's an off year. In 2005, the oil giant earned a net profit of $36.1 billion, or "more money than any corporation had made in history," writes Steve Coll in his illuminating saga of the most successful and largest heir to John D. Rockefeller's strangling monopoly, Standard Oil. Simply put, ExxonMobil has been among the world's largest and most profitable companies since the 1950s, and it is so confident of its future that it recently raised the dividend paid to shareholders by a whopping 21 percent.

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