I find this to be awesome on many levels.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...a-then-he-got-revenge/?utm_term=.d82fbeb2559dRex Tillerson hadn't been CEO of ExxonMobil very long when the late president Hugo Chavez made foreign oil companies in Venezuela an offer they couldn't refuse. Give the government a bigger cut, or else.
Most of the companies took the deal. Tillerson refused.
Chavez responded by nationalizing ExxonMobil's considerable assets in the country, which the company valued at $10 billion. The losses were a big blow to Tillerson, who reportedly took the seizure as a personal affront.
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Flash forward to May 2015. Just five days after former military general David Granger was elected president of the South American nation of Guyana, unseating the country’s long-ruling leftist party, ExxonMobil made a big announcement.
In the deep blue waters 120 miles off Guyana’s coast, the company scored a major oil discovery: as much as 1.4 billion barrels of high-quality crude. Tillerson told company shareholders the well, Liza-1, was the largest oil find anywhere in the world that year.
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There was just one problem with this undersea bonanza. Venezuela claimed the waters — and the hydrocarbons beneath them — as its own.
Clearly drilling in the disputed area was potentially a good business decision for ExxonMobil, not some sort of elaborate revenge scheme by its CEO.
But revenge had been served. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's successor, was livid.
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At current oil prices, the Liza deposits could be worth $70 billion, more than 30 times the size of Guyana's annual GDP.