A hip-hop breakdown of Big Oil's quarterly earnings — Exxon's $28.8 billion, Chevron's $12.3 billion — set against the people paying at the pump. The lyrics treat earnings reports like rap sheets, reading the numbers with the cadence of a prosecutor's closing argument. Each verse follows the money: from wellhead to refinery to gas station to shareholder dividend. The bridge asks the question nobody in the boardroom wants to answer: what's the profit margin on a planet? Based entirely on real financial data from 2025-2026 earnings calls.
[verse 1]
Twenty-eight point eight billion on the Exxon sheet,
Chevron pulled in twelve point three, call it Wall Street neat,
Quarter after quarter stacking figures to the sky,
Seven point five billion in a single Q, don't lie,
Shell came with the five point three, BP on the chase,
Twenty-seven billion combined, that's a quarterly pace,
Board rooms lit with champagne flutes and golden parachutes,
While a single mother in the Midwest fills her tank and computes,
Three-ten a gallon, seventeen hundred every year,
Squeezed between the grocery bill and rent that's always near,
They say the market sets the rate, invisible supply,
But the hand is very visible when profits touch the sky,
CEO compensation up another forty-two percent,
But wages at the refinery flatlined, every cent,
Record buybacks, dividends paid, shareholders celebrate,
Meanwhile working families just negotiate with fate
[chorus]
Who pays the price? Who pays the price?
Billions at the top, at the bottom sacrifice,
Who pays the price? Who pays the price?
Fill the tank, break the bank, roll the dice,
Who pays the price? Who pays the price?
They call it market forces but it don't feel nice
[verse 2]
Gulf Coast pumping two-thirty-nine, West Coast four and change,
Same barrel, same crude, but the spread is always strange,
Refinery margins padded, cracking spread is wide,
Eighty-dollar crude but the pump tells a different side,
Full year twenty-five saw Exxon volumes climb,
Production up but earnings down from the prior time,
Thirty-three point seven was the twenty-four parade,
Even at the dip they made more money than they prayed,
Subsidies keep flowing like the crude through every pipe,
Billions from the taxpayers for a fruit that's overripe,
Wael Sawan said headwinds, oversupply in twenty-six,
But when the surplus hits the market watch the price stay fixed,
Ryan Lance at Conoco saying flat with modest growth,
Lower costs, production up, they want to have them both,
When the surplus brings the barrel down, the pump won't budge a dime,
Goes up like a rocket, trickles down on borrowed time
[bridge]
Tell me what the spreadsheet says tonight,
Column A is profit, column B is plight,
Tell me where the subsidy resides,
In the pocket of the board or the folks along for rides,
Who pays the price? Who pays the price?
Every quarter, every barrel, every slice
[outro]
Who pays the price? Who pays the price?
Twenty-eight point eight says it ain't the enterprise,
Who pays the price?
We do, we do, we do
