President Trump used an Oval Office executive-order signing on Monday to accuse the oil majors of taking too much out of American drivers, and he brought a number with him. "When you look at one company, where they made 12 times what they made the year before, they're going to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price. I'll say it loud and clear: I'm not happy about it," the president said [1]. He returned to the theme in the same appearance, saying the companies "made too much money, too much money. Chevron, too much money. Exxon Mobil, too much. Too much money" [1].
The complaint underneath that number is well documented, and it deserves to be stated before the correction. Chevron reported $12.07 billion in quarterly profit, PBS NewsHour reports [3]. Exxon Mobil reported net income of $14.53 billion for the same quarter, Euronews reports [4]. Over the stretch that produced those results, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States went from below $3, before the American and Israeli attacks on Iran, to $4.11 on Friday, July 31 [3]. CBS News describes the current pump price as above $4 a gallon against approximately $3 before the war [1]. More than $26 billion in combined reported profit at two companies in three months, while the person filling a tank pays roughly a dollar more per gallon than before the shooting started, is a legitimate thing for a president to be loud about.
Twelve times is still not the number. PBS NewsHour reports that Chevron "nearly quadrupled its profits to $12.07 billion," which is roughly four times [3]. Euronews reports that Exxon Mobil's profits doubled, to $14.53 billion in net income, which is roughly two times [4]. Four and two are the multiples in the reporting on the two companies the president named by name. Neither is twelve, and no source checked for this piece produces a twelvefold increase for either one.
There is a plausible path to the error that requires no bad faith at all. Chevron's quarterly profit was $12.07 billion. A twelve is sitting right there in the Chevron line, attached to a dollar sign rather than to a multiplier. Reading that dollar figure back out as a multiple produces close to the exact sentence the president said. That is a reading of how the mistake could have happened, offered as a possibility rather than as an established fact. Nobody in the Oval Office said where the figure came from.
One limit on this piece is worth stating plainly, because it changes what can and cannot be asserted. The multiples above come from how PBS NewsHour and Euronews characterized the year-over-year change, "nearly quadrupled" and doubled [3][4]. Chevron's and Exxon Mobil's own investor releases sit outside the set of documents fetched for this piece, and secondary outlets put Chevron's year-earlier comparator anywhere from $2.4 billion to $3.0 billion, a spread wide enough to move the multiple by more than a full turn. The ratio has not been computed here from two primary company figures, and the exact prior-year baseline is not pinned. What survives that uncertainty is the claim itself. For $12.07 billion to be twelve times a prior-year quarter, that quarter would have to have come in around $1 billion, and nothing in the record checked here points anywhere near it.
The Oval Office remarks were not the whole of Monday. On Truth Social the president wrote, "That goes for other Oil Companies as well… and get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!" [2]. He singled out Chevron chief executive Mike Wirth in the same run of posts, writing that "The only thing [Wirth] conveniently forgot to mention is that, without the genius, foresight, strength, and stability of the TRUMP Administration, the Oil Industry, and our Country itself, would be DEAD!" [2].
Crude was falling underneath all of it. Al Jazeera put Brent at $82.91 a barrel as of 11:59am GMT on Monday, down 5 percent from the previous day and down nearly 18 percent from July's peak of $101 a barrel [2]. The wholesale half of the president's complaint is already correcting. The retail half is the part he is demanding, and $4.11 on July 31 is the most recent pump figure in the record checked here [3].
Rating the sentence: the twelvefold claim is unsupported by every source examined. Rating the argument the sentence was reaching for: the profits are real, the pump price is real, and the distance between the two is a matter a president is entitled to raise. A demand that Chevron and Exxon Mobil cut retail prices did not need an inflated multiple to stand up. $12.07 billion and $14.53 billion in a single quarter, set beside $4.11 a gallon, carry that argument without any help.
