Apple And Oil -- August 25, 2020

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Apple, Inc:

• judge threads the needle: orders Apple to not bloc Epic Engine, but allows Apple to keep Fortnite off platform; link here;
• Apple to re-open a "small number" of stores that were closed twice by pandemic; link here;
• Apple to open its first online store in India next month, September, 2020; link here;
• last quarter, MacBook sales surged by a fifth compared to the same period last year; link here;
• trend of working and studying remotely continues to grow

Fracking; from Texas Monthly -- the "mother fracker" reckons with the mother of all oil busts.

Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield has been through more ups and downs than just about anyone in the business. This bust, he says, will change everything—forever.  This article was part of Texas Monthly's July 2020 "The Pandemic Has Changed Everything" package.

The lede:

One morning in mid-April, Scott Sheffield, the chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, one of the largest oil producers in America, seated himself in the wood-paneled boardroom of his company’s headquarters in Irving, gazed into his computer’s camera, and begged a trio of Texas politicians for a lifeline. Over the past two months, oil prices had tanked 60 percent, effectively ending a years-long Texas boom and heralding what many in the industry were calling “the mother of all busts.” 

As an estimated 30,000 viewers around the world watched online, Sheffield beseeched the three members of the Texas Railroad Commission, the elected body that regulates the state’s oil industry, to limit production, in a bid he hoped would ultimately boost the global price of crude. 

Sheffield’s message bordered on heresy. He declared that the same oil revolution that had transformed the United States from petroleum importer to exporter had brought the industry to the brink of financial ruin. “It has been an economic disaster, especially the last ten years,” he said in testimony that had the feel of a key witness turning state’s evidence. “Nobody wants to give us capital because we have all destroyed capital and created economic waste.” If the government didn’t swoop in to save Texas oil producers from their excesses, Sheffield warned, “we will disappear as an industry, like the coal industry.” 

It was a stunning admission coming from a man who has done as much as anyone to engineer a geological and geopolitical bonanza, one that now looks like a bubble. But the request for government intervention was also a characteristically strategic play for self-preservation by one of the longest-serving chieftains of the oil business—an industry that, following decades of expansion, now appears on the cusp of a slow, long-term decline.

It's a long article; I read through it quickly. Somehow the article did not resonate with me. Possibly because I do not follow the Permian. It certainly seems that based on what little I know, the Bakken and the Permian are two very different plays, about the only thing they have in common is that they are both shale plays. 

I have to read the article again to see what I'm missing, but I guess I was "turned off" immediately when the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources said that "if the government didn’t swoop in to save Texas oil producers from their excesses, Sheffield warned, “we will disappear as an industry, like the coal industry.”

Somehow I have trouble relating to that.