ExxonMobil reunited two pieces of Rockefeller's broken-up Standard Oil
In 1911 the US government forced John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil to split into pieces. Nearly ninety years later, two of the biggest fragments, Exxon and Mobil, merged again. The combined ExxonMobil, completed in 1999, became the world's largest investor-owned oil company, producing roughly 3 percent of the planet's oil.
Exxon descends from Standard Oil's New Jersey arm, which kept the Standard name after the breakup and grew into the world's dominant oil firm, partly by buying Humble Oil in the 1930s. The trouble was that it could not use the Standard name everywhere in the United States, so it juggled brands such as Esso, Enco and Humble. In 1972 it replaced them all with a single invented name: Exxon.
Mobil's roots run back to the Vacuum Oil Company of 1866, which Standard bought in 1879 and released in 1911. Vacuum merged with Standard Oil of New York, known as Socony, in 1931, and that company later became Mobil. When the two giants agreed to combine in 1998, the deal was structured as Exxon buying Mobil, and Exxon's stock ticker changed from XON to XOM.
Today the company, based in a Houston suburb, works across the whole industry, from exploration to refining to chemicals such as plastics and synthetic rubber. Exploration and production bring in about 70 percent of revenue, with operations from the Permian Basin to offshore Guyana, where it found more oil in 2024. It ranks eighth by revenue among American companies and produces about 2 percent of the world's energy.
That scale brings heavy criticism and litigation. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska remains one of the most environmentally damaging ever, and the company has been widely condemned for its history of denying the scientific consensus on climate change. In 2024 it was responsible for 610 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 1.58 percent of the global total.
Source: ExxonMobil
