Oil Earnings, Binance Heist, A MAHA Update

The U.S. oil industry has earned over $130 billion since the U.S. and Israel started a war in Iran.

Profits are three times higher than during the same period last year.

I'm Ayesha Rascoe.

And I'm Scott Simon, and this is Up First from NPR News.

ExxonMobil and Chevron report their best earnings in years, while the price of gasoline takes a bigger bite out of people's paychecks.

Also, it took hackers about 20 minutes to steal $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency this week.

And how clean is our diet, our water, soil and air since Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s crusade for a healthier America? We check in on the Maha movement.

So please stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your weekend.

Oil companies are reporting another quarter of sky-high profits as the war in Iran pushes up the price of oil.

NPR's energy reporter Willa Rubin has been listening to their earnings calls. She joins us now. Thanks for being with us, Willa.

Thanks for having me.

What kind of profits did these companies report?

Well, we're talking about a lot of money. Exxon said that it doubled its earnings compared to this time last year. Shell nearly doubled. It was their second highest quarterly earnings ever. Chevron's earnings were up 180%.

Is it all because the war in Iran has disrupted the oil supply?

That is a really big piece of it. It's limited the amount of oil that's coming out of the Middle East. You know, our demand for oil hasn't changed much. We need it to heat our homes and drive our cars and run our tractors and truck everything we buy around the country. A barrel of Brent crude is now trading around $113 a barrel. Before the war, it was about seventy. Here's what energy analyst Dan Pickering says these high prices have meant for the oil companies.

The majors are able to sell their barrels that they produce in the U.S. or Latin America or Europe for much higher prices. So the Middle East's loss is generally the gain of oil and gas companies in U.S. and Europe.

And do we know what they're doing with all that money?

A good chunk is going to their shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. But these companies are not really spending a ton on things like new drilling projects. You know, oil is a cyclical industry. Prices move up and down. Companies want to hold onto that cash when times are good so that they can insulate themselves when they're not so good.

Oil companies are making huge profits just as drivers are paying so much to fill up their tanks. Did any of these executives directly address this pain to consumers?

Well, Exxon CEO Darren Woods was one of the few to take this on during his company's earnings call. We recognize the impact high prices have on people's lives and economic growth. And Exxon's solution, he said, is to produce as much as they can to bring more fuel to market. With products in short supply, our teams have done everything they can to keep prices down by maximizing production. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said something similar.

What we can do is what we can control, and that's help consumers get as much as they possibly can out of our systems.

Executives from all the companies pointed out that they're dealing with a massive supply shock, you know, not only the war in Iran, but also Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries that have taken a lot of capacity offline.

Did any of the executives say if they think oil prices would come down anytime soon?

They said because the war has gone on this long, global oil reserves are really depleted. On Shell's earnings call, CEO Wael Sohn said that he thought high oil prices six months ago was a temporary spike, but he said

We are seeing that inventory levels are being drawn down very quickly, and it's going to take quite some time to be able to refill that inventory.

meaning it's hard to see how oil prices will come down until those reserves get replenished.

What kind of political reaction is there? Has there been against these high profits?

Well, we are a few days out from the midterms. If Democrats gain control of Congress, this may not be the first thing on their agenda, but some of them have pushed to create a tax on windfall profits. These are excess profits that come about because of geopolitical forces outside of companies' control. The idea is to give some of those profits to Americans. I talked to economist Isabella Weber, she is at UMass Amherst. She says windfall taxes are a way to bridge the gap between what oil companies make and what most people pay for that oil.

This is, uh, I think, uh, good economic policy in an energy shock situation where you get these redistribution dynamics amidst a very deep cost of living crisis.

While the executives didn't mention windfall taxes, um, on these calls, last quarter, Exxon CEO Darren Woods called them a misguided policy. He said they penalize companies that are trying to be successful in a volatile industry. Now, the Trump administration is trying to lower the price of diesel. They've waived sanctions on Russia to allow them to move more fuel onto the market. They loosened federal rules on a type of diesel used for farming, but experts have told me these moves probably won't make much of a difference, and not before Tuesday.

And there's Willa Rubin. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

The largest crypto heist in history this week, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was hacked. Billions of dollars are missing.

The hack comes as the crypto industry has been trying to get a little more respectability. The Trump administration has been friendly in regulating it, but critics warn that cryptocurrency is the wild west of finance, and this massive hack of Binance proves it.

NPR senior business editor Rafael Nam joins us. Rafael, thanks for being with us. Hey Scott, How did this happen? How did they lose so much money?

I know it's a staggering amount. So a group of hackers widely believed to be the North Hm. Korean military broke into accounts that investors hold at Binance to trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and then stole their money essentially. Now, now Binance has promised to repay anybody who lost money and is working hard at recovering as much of it as it can. The company says they've managed to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen crypto.

You don't often hear about so much money being taken stolen from a financial exchange. How did it happen?

So there's still a lot we don't know, Scott, and it's too early to say whether there were any major major flaws in Binance's security system. If anything, researchers I talked to say it may have more to do with how sophisticated North Korean hackers are, but the one thing critics did point out is that the way these crypto exchanges are set up deserves some scrutiny here. What's peculiar is that at crypto exchanges, Hm. you can not only buy and sell Bitcoin, for example, you can also hold that Bitcoin at a trading account at the exchange itself.

That's a very unique and risky feature that makes it different from traditional stock exchanges, according to Amanda Fisher from financial advocacy group Better Markets. You may trade on the New York Stock Exchange, but you don't keep your funds with the New York Stock Exchange, you keep it with your broker. And your broker is audited and regulated by the SEC, and your broker has to pay for insurance that will make customers whole in the event that there's a cyberattack.

So, Rafael, what are the consequences when crypto exchanges become this kind of one-stop shop for trading?

Well, first, it makes crypto exchanges a tempting target for hackers. You know, Scott, it's kinda like the famous quote attributed to Robert Willie Sutton, when asked why he targeted banks, he supposedly said, Because that's where the money is. And second, although Binance has said they will pay back investors who lost money, they don't necessarily have to offer the same protections as established financial institutions, and that can lead to risky behavior by crypto exchanges. This is Fisher again.

It can become almost irresistible to dip into those client funds just this one time, you know, is what they say, to cover their losses, but we know that that can cascade into catastrophe for investors. And I should say this has happened before, including most prominently with crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2022.

Why don't crypto exchanges have to follow the same rules as Wall Street?

So this one drives crypto critics crazy. They think the crypto sector is trying to have it both ways. Exchanges like Binance say Hm. they are safe venues and they don't, and they deny they do anything shady, but they also don't want to follow the same rules as Wall Street firms. They say this is a young and promising industry that needs easier regulations to grow. Hm.

Could a theft of this magnitude lead to changes?

Probably not is what I'm hearing. Scott, under the Biden administration, regulators took a really strict approach to the crypto sector, but the Trump administration has promised a much lighter regulatory approach. So many consumer advocates consistently tell Americans, when it comes to crypto, buyer beware.

Rafael, thanks for being with us.

Thank you, Scott.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump joined forces just over two years ago, promising to make America healthy again, or MAHA. They had a grand agenda to bring down the rates of chronic disease, reform the food system, and clean up harmful chemicals.

To see how they've delivered on these promises, NPR health correspondent Will Stone joins us now. Good morning, Will.

Hey, Aisha, good to be here.

How do folks who support the Maha platform feel about the last two years? Uh, can you run us through some of their promises?

Yeah, it's mixed. Uh, one obvious victory were the new dietary guidelines. These were a real departure from the previous

ones, and they reflect the Maha philosophy, encouraging people to eat more saturated fat, uh, though they didn't actually change the limits, and to avoid processed foods, they did raise the daily goals for protein. But when you look at how this administration has handled other issues around food and, more broadly, our water, our air, which all gets bundled under concerns around toxic chemicals, uh, some say the track record is not great if you grade them by their own, uh, Maha rubric.

Encouraging people to eat more saturated fat, though they didn't actually change the limits, and to avoid processed foods, they did raise the daily goals for protein. But when you look at how this administration has handled other issues around food and, more broadly, our water, our air, which all gets bundled under concerns around toxic chemicals, some say the track record is not great if you grade them by their own Maha rubric.

Oh, well, what happened?

Yeah, well, here's what I heard from Kelly Ryerison. She's a Maha activist, mostly focused on pesticides and runs a nonprofit called American Regeneration. I cannot think of a single good thing that the EPA has done during this administration. Instead, they've rolled back protections, drinking water from forever chemicals, they've approved pesticides that have no business being approved.

It sounds like they've really upset some people.

You bet. And you can hear Ryerson is focusing on the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, because that agency shapes a lot of this policy. And what's striking is that some of the chemicals identified in the Trump administration's own Maha report as possibly harmful for children's health are the same ones EPA has moved to weaken protections around.

What chemicals are we talking about here?

So a big example here is the pesticide glyphosate, the main ingredient in the weed killer Roundup. Now, in this case, many in this movement have wanted to see meaningful action on glyphosate because of cancer concerns. Instead, the Trump administration backed the company that makes Roundup in a high-profile Supreme Court case, which the company ultimately won. And Trump signed an executive order encouraging domestic production of the pesticide, and that's disenchanted a lot of Maha supporters.

The goal of changing our food supply and reducing chemicals was to help reduce chronic diseases. I is that what they're hoping for?

Yeah, actually, Kennedy came on NPR in November, right after the 2024 election, and he said Trump expected measurable progress in reducing chronic diseases in two years. Uh, so I called up an expert on this, Barry Popkin. He's a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health. He said he doesn't see any evidence that this has happened. Here's his assessment of how they've done.

They've raised a lot of important issues pesticides about ultra-processed foods. They've also done a number of things which are terribly dangerous. They've really unleashed

A group of people in this country that will not get vaccinated. We've seen major measles outbreaks. Also pointed to some of the large foodborne illness outbreaks that have affected thousands of Americans in the last year or two.

Well, what's Maha hoping for next?

Well, there's real tension here around who speaks for this movement beyond Kennedy. For example, there was recently a high-profile Maha summit in D.C. and it was stacked with figures from corporate America. Kelly Ryerison told me she was mortified. I don't even recognize this iteration of Maha. It it was so confusing to see all these corporate interests when very specifically the grassrooters want out of the Maha movement is to get corporations out of the way. And she says the Maha brand may need to evolve in 2027, uh, depending on how things shake out in the midterms.

That's NPR health correspondent Will Stone. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And that's up first for All Hallows Eve, Saturday, October thirty-first, 2026. I'm Scott Simon.

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