Liam Denning, Columnist

Exxon Is Now the Thing It Wasn't Supposed to Be

Shrinking discipline and rising leverage make what was once the smartest oil major a risky play on crude prices.

December 1, 2020 at 10:44 AM EST

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Outlook increasingly cloudy.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

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Exxon Mobil Corp. is about to lose perhaps $20 billion from its books. But it has lost something worth maybe 10 times that amount: its reputation.

Exxon used to occupy the penthouse in that ivory edifice known as Supermajor Towers. Its neighbors shared this rarefied space but got off the elevator many floors below.

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