Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are the cost.”
That’s the part they’d rather you not sit with. A $3 billion cut is a rounding error next to a $53 billion acquisition and a $20 billion buyback program. They could have found it anywhere. They found it in 8,000 households because those are the households that don’t get a vote on the earnings call. The Guyana oil fields Chevron fought Exxon in court to keep will pump for another decade. The people who kept the company running while that deal closed get a severance packet and a press release about capital discipline.
And it lands on the Fourth of July, which is almost too on the nose. Independence Day, and the freedom on offer is the freedom to be a line item — cut so the share price can tick up half a percent while a man who makes more before lunch than you make in a year tells investors the portfolio is “advantaged.” The company is fine. The company is better than fine. That was never the question. The question was whether 8,000 people were worth more to Chevron than a sliver of one quarter’s buyback, and today they gave you the answer in writing.