Exxon Mobil: world-class at finding oil… dogsh*t at finding places to stash 2,000 employees.

According to reports, Big Oil’s clean-up crew is tossing out 2,000 jobs globally… about 3-4% of its 61,000-person workforce. CEO Darren Woods broke the news in a memo, pitching the cuts as part of a long-term “efficiency drive.” Which, of course, is executive code for: we just spent $60 billion buying Pioneer, and someone has to pay for it. (And if you think that “someone” is Darren Woods, you must be new here.)

If it feels like Exxon layoffs are starting to sound like your sister’s new boyfriend at Christmas (showing up every damn year whether you want them or not) that’s because they are. Back in November, the company quietly shaved off 400 jobs in Texas. This year they decided, why not go global? Consolidate some offices, kill a few Zoom links, and suddenly it’s “shareholder value.”

And Exxon isn’t acting in a vacuum. The whole industry is playing musical chairs with payrolls. Imperial Oil (where Exxon’s the big shareholder) just took out 20% of its staff in Calgary. Chevron is aiming for up to 20% cuts globally. BP is trimming about 5%, and ConocoPhillips has gone full Marie Kondo, thanking a quarter of its employees for their service before showing them the door.

The problem isn’t exactly a Scooby-Doo mystery. Donnie Politics promised Big Oil a full-blown “drill baby drill” sequel… but like most political promises… we ended up getting the opposite (funny how that works). Brent’s down about 10.5% this year,  leaving companies that just dropped billions on rivals looking like they bought beachfront property in Ohio. At the same time, Wall Street still expects Big Oil to pump out oversized returns, even with crude prices sliding. That leaves management with only one lever to pull (cut jobs, trim projects, and squeeze more output from fewer resources) and then package the whole thing as “efficiency.”

On the ground, it shows. Rigs in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico aren’t exactly churning liquid gold… a lot of them are parked, waiting for better margins. Big projects that looked good when crude was flying high suddenly look like money pits, so CFOs are delaying them the way you delay a dentist appointment… knowing you’ll eventually have to go, but praying something changes first. So yeah, as of right now, the “boom” that was promised looks more like a holding pattern…

(Source: Reuters)

Meanwhile, Exxon’s decided if it can’t drill its way to glory, it might as well arbitrage it. At the same time, Exxon’s making a very different bet. Instead of doubling down on drilling, it’s leaning hard into trading. London has become the company’s new nerve center, where headcount has doubled to about 300 as Exxon stuffs the place with traders and analysts who see more upside in price spreads than in drilling another well. They even grabbed Vitol’s former LNG chief to run operations in Singapore, with plans to double LNG sales to 40 million tons a year by 2030.

What we’ve got here is the ultimate split-screen: hard hats dragging their toolbags to the parking lot while Wolf of Wall Street wannabes hammer Bloomberg terminals and bet on half-cent price swings. And honestly, Exxon’s logic isn’t crazy. Oil projects take years, billions, and a small army of regulators. Trading desks on the other hand can spin market chaos into profit in any market environment. 

It’s also a way better story to sell to shareholders: “Don’t worry about the rigs, we’re making money playing spreadsheets.” Will that keep the stock from bleeding out? Who the heck knows. But until crude stops acting like a moody teenager, Exxon doesn’t have many other plays.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Exxon as mentioned in the article.