Saudi Aramco is essentially part of the Saudi government, not an apples to apples comparison IMO. If they're going to discount the free mineral rights given to Aramco, then they should also account for the social services that the government uses Aramco to pay for, because without the social services, you're not getting free mineral rights.
This isn't terribly surprising to me. Pulling money out of the ground is a high-margin, low (relative) cost deal. Like selling $1 for $2.<p>I do wonder how many people know that the wealthiest companies are private, just like how the wealthiest people/families/syndicates do not publish nor reveal their wealth in any meaningful way. It's like the universe's dark matter. At some point, money becomes power, and power always whispers.
Either it stops being profitable because we stop using its product and civilization survives, or it stops being profitable because we stop using its product because civilization collapses. Either way, the long term outlook isn't good.
> Somewhere around two-thirds of Saudi nationals work for the government. Many of these people do virtually nothing, they are employed simply for social purposes, to keep the population happy. Thus, their incomes are very similar to universal basic incomes. The Saudi government gets 90 percent of its income from oil revenue, which given the ease of producing oil in Saudi Arabia and the use of foreign partners to do much of the producing makes this revenue source pretty similar to simply printing money. In Saudi Arabia money doesn’t grow on trees, but it does bubble out of the ground.<p>Saudi has been running a real large scale UBI experiment for decades, showing how you end up a stagnant, backwards and authoritarian society.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/10/03/saudi-government-budget-cuts-prove-basic-income-is-no-solution-to-slow-economic-growth/#3d440ead4bbe" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/10/03/saudi...</a>
I'm very puzzled, if they're generating $25 billion in profit/quarter, why do they need to get a loan? They could just pocket the earnings for a couple months.
Weirdly behind very closed doors it's said to still be run as a modern American western company. No body wants to mess with what works.<p>Of course the trillion dollar question is how much oil is truly left?