Greasing the wheels...

So I know I've been hard on oil companies in the past. I've called them unscrupulous evil fucks, and you know what - perhaps I've been wrong all along.

Exxon have released their profit details for the second quarter of 2008. Now, the cynical among you will bemoan the fact that they're a bunch of price gouging, money grubbing wankers. But if you look at the numbers, they've only made a profit of $1485.55 a second.

Huh?

Yeah that's right. Between April & June, Exxon were making $1485.55 every second. That's a total profit of $11.68 billion in profit. Just to be clear about this, Exxon could have made given away eleven billion dollars, and still made a profit of more than six hundred million dollars.

In three months, they made enough cash that they could give every person on the face of the Earth 2 dollars. Now, maybe it's just me...but a company that's making that much profit (and let's remember, we're not talking about turnover, we're talking about clear profit) should perhaps look at reinvesting their cash...so I shall now endevour to offer them some purchasing options.

1. They could buy NASA. Their annual budget's 16 billion, which means that Exxon could easily have their own space shuttles up and running with less than half a year's profits. Who knows, maybe they'll have some better names for space shuttles than NASA will (they can't do much worse than the UK's space agency, who wanted to name their next venus probe Yappy Dog Three).

2. They can buy Hollywood for the year. According to Forbes, the leading men & women of Hollywood netted 731 million bucks this year. So Exxon could easily afford to buy the biggest ensemble movie ever. They could make a movie of Dallas, with Will Smith as Bobby Ewing and directed by Steven Speilberg.

3. You could play Monopoly for real. Thames Water was recently sold for 7 billion, and I'm pretty sure that with the state of Network Rail, you'd be able to pick up Fenchurch street for about 12 quid. Though building a bunch of identical red hotels may have some problems getting past the planning phase in Kensington.

Or you know...you could give 2 bucks to everyone on the damn planet.