Big Digital Energy

0:00 Hold on a minute, before we do this, because this is kind of the inaugural holy shit emergency BDE thing. Yeah, I want like some cool music. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. I

0:12 think I'm more of like a presidential state of the union. Address, uh, music. Yeah, maybe Jacob can throw that in. But real quick, uh, we had some news drop, uh, with the pioneer in Exxon.

0:25 FTC approval, um, which had been a really big deal, uh, and it shouldn't be a big deal because buying oil and gas reserves, you know, the FTC, the federal trade commission reviews mergers so

0:39 that there can't be collaboration. We're not recording on cameras. I'll take top of my head off. You, you, you, you need to give me a little more room above my head. There you go. Thanks. All

0:51 right. We got a camera turned on now. So now we can continue talking about this. So go ahead. No, so the FTC Federal Trade Commission is in effect was set up so that you don't have monopolies,

1:05 right? You can't go buy everyone, you know, they look at what percent of market share the two companies are having all that. Total bullshit when it comes to the world of oil, right? I mean, the

1:15 United States produces, let's call it 12 of the world's oil. Yeah. And so you're telling me that if Exxon and Pioneer buy each other, that's gonna be able to influence global robot. Yeah, it's

1:30 not material. So it's bullshit that the FTC is even looking at this. What they did, and they were taking a ton of amount of time. Used to, this was kind of like 15 day stuff, check the box.

1:41 Yeah. Because of that, all of the big Permian mergers have had amazing scrutiny from the FTC under the Biden administration. Yeah, but - Okay, I'll just go ahead and say it, it's environmentally

1:56 driven type stuff. But it's not just oil and gas, like tech, industry Silicon Valley hates the head of the FTC, Lena Kahn is her name. And people are bashing her all the time on Twitter because

2:13 she hates mergers and acquisitions across the board. It's not just oil and gas. And so this has been a big thing on tech Twitter is, what's the point of building a tech startup? If you have no

2:24 liquidity, like you can't get it, you can't get it. Yeah, you can't get it. Yeah, you can't get it fired. Yeah. And so FTC's making no friends on either side or industry. OK, you've taken

2:35 away the

2:39 overmardom, martyrism that we in energy normally feel like it's the body. Did I just kick your legs out from on you? No, but so the FTC came and approved the Pioneer Exxon mergers I can go through.

2:52 with one provision. They said Scott Sheffield cannot be on the board of Exxon because he's been colluding with, possibly colluding with OPEC to set gasoline prices. Yeah, and you know, I think it

3:06 was Javier that posted this on Twitter, but he's like, this is ridiculous. You know, what they're talking about is when Scott Sheffield was talking with operators and negative oil prices in 2020

3:18 and getting everyone on the same page of like, Hey, what are we gonna do here? And even Joe Biden had made comments that, Hey, drilling has to stop now. And so it wasn't price collusion. It

3:29 wasn't working to fix prices. It was, oh shit, we're all about to lose our companies in the industries, about to collapse. And so, yeah, like, why would you not be talking to other companies?

3:41 This is petty ass bullshit. That's what it is. And I need to give this disclaimer. You know, Brian Sheffield's a friend of mine I like Brian, Kim, who's Scott's wife. coolest person on the

3:53 planet. Love Kim to death, she's great. So friends and all that without that, I would still be sitting there saying this is bullshit. Energy-senic actually tweeted out. That's all that, yeah.

4:04 Yeah, and he's anti-Cheffield. And he's like, there's a lot of things to trash the Sheffield's about, potentially the merger with Pioneer and Parsley, all that. But he said, even this is

4:17 ridiculous. He said, agree. A lot of the Sheffield's can be criticized for parentheses, son and done, but this ain't it. We have idiots at the FTC, so. So one other thing, and I'm gonna try

4:28 to be somewhat coy, 'cause I don't know that this is public information I should be sharing, but I'll go ahead and say it. One of the other mergers going through some stuff, I mean, one of the

4:41 companies was talking, this is an extra million dollars to just comply with the information requests from the FTC. I mean a million extra dollars in what they had budgeted for all the information

4:53 they're asking for. Yeah. And

4:57 I think Diamondback and Endeavor are going through the same thing, you know, the same process right now. They have the same scrutiny. You got it. So, but I saw something about Diamondback and

5:09 FTC. So, um, anticipate that they'll go through that same scrutiny and, um, oh, you got two large operators smurging in the Permian, there's going to be price collusion and things of this

5:21 nature. And to your point, it's like it doesn't fucking if OPEC can't control the market with all the production they have. Why do you think that? Operators are going to. Or I'd actually put it

5:31 the other way OPEC can control the market today by taking oil off. Yeah. As we've seen over the last six months and so what does this have to do?