Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012) by Steve Coll

What a difference a few years make! When “Private Empire” was first published in 2013, ExxonMobil was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, a quarter-trillion-dollar behemoth, delivering jaw-dropping quarterly profit statements that late night talk show hosts found as monologue fodder. By the dawn of 2020, however, the world had changed whereas ExxonMobil had not. Apple is worth over a trillion dollars. Amazon and Google are close to reaching the same dizzying milestone. ExxonMobil, on the other hand, is stuck at the same valuation nearly a decade later.

This book temporarily achieved some relevance when, in early 2017, president Donald Trump appointed Rex Tillerson secretary of state. Could the CEO of an international oil & gas giant successfully translate his savvy negotiating skills to Foggy Bottom? The answer, evidently, is “no” given Tillerson’s short tenure in office – although that’s mainly a political question, I suppose.

“Private Empire” is not a narrative corporate history. Rather, each chapter can stand on its own as a snippet looking into the life of a multinational corporation. The book begins with the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska and ends with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (even though the latter was the responsibility of BP, not ExxonMobil).

In between, Coll tells the story of a company that holds interests not dissimilar to that of a sovereign state. An authority that holds interests in the Aceh region in Indonesia, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Orinoco basin of Venezuela. Coll develops each side story with skill and objectiveness. What I loved about this book was its feeling of fairness. Coll was not out to excoriate ExxonMobil, nor is he anything like an apologist. I feel like I walked away from this thick book with a solid understanding of ExxonMobil’s state in the world.