Under Lee Raymond, who put Exxon and Mobil together 25 years ago in the industry's biggest merger, it was the company's sacred tenet. But that doctrine lost its luster under Rex Tillerson, who took over from Raymond in 2006 and ran Exxon for a decade. Tillerson was greedy when everyone else was greedy; under the executive who became Donald Trump's first secretary of state, the company's return on capital employed plunged, its net debt rose and it bought rivals at the very peak of the cycle.
The result was that Exxon was too weak financially to invest countercyclically by the time current Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods took over in 2017. When oil and natural gas prices plunged during the pandemic, Exxon had to retreat as everyone else did in the industry because its balance sheet was overstretched. Exxon wasn't anymore different – it was just another giant oil company.
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