ExxonMobil’s takeover bid rumours of Woodside

ExxonMobil and Woodside

A Full Scenario and Valuation Workup on a Deal That Does Not Exist Yet

Prepared June 21 2026. Status: speculative. Woodside has stated on the record that it is not aware of any proposal and is not in discussions with ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil has not commented. Everything below is built on the assumption that early stage internal evaluation, reported by Bloomberg on June 12 2026, eventually becomes a real process. Treat every output number as conditional on that assumption, not as a forecast of what will happen.

THE TRIGGER

Bloomberg reported on June 12 2026 that ExxonMobil has been studying acquisition targets including Woodside Energy as part of an effort to deepen its LNG footprint and its access to Asian gas demand. The people described as familiar with the matter said deliberations were preliminary, internal, and at an early stage, with no certainty that a formal offer would follow. Woodside’s American depositary shares jumped 8.35 percent in New York that Friday. Woodside issued a formal denial on June 15, stating it was not aware of any proposal and was not in discussions with ExxonMobil. Western Australia’s Premier, Roger Cook, used the same weekend to say the state government would fight to keep Woodside headquartered in Perth, invoking the precedent of 2001, when Treasurer Peter Costello blocked a takeover attempt by Shell on national interest grounds even though Shell already held roughly a third of Woodside’s shares at the time.

That is the entire factual record as of this writing. A rumor, a denial, a premier’s warning, and a fourteen year old precedent everyone in Canberra and Perth remembers without needing to look it up. What follows is the work a banker would actually do the week such a rumor breaks, run all the way through, with every number traceable to a source and every assumption labeled as an assumption.

PART ONE. WHY THIS RUMOR EXISTS AT ALL

ExxonMobil’s own results explain the appetite. Full year 2025 earnings came in at $28.8 billion, down from $33.7 billion in 2024, on weaker crude prices and chemical margins. Cash flow from operations held up at $52.0 billion and free cash flow at $26.1 billion, both still growing on a multi year basis, but the earnings decline matters because it is happening into a balance sheet that has never had more capacity to act. Debt to capital sits at 14.0 percent and net debt to capital at 11.0 percent, both descriptions ExxonMobil itself calls industry leading. The company closed 2025 with $10.7 billion of cash and has been running a $20 billion a year buyback alongside $17.2 billion of dividends. That is a company with the balance sheet to do something and an earnings trajectory that gives management a reason to want to.

The strategic logic for LNG specifically traces to a war. Possibly Exxon has become more focused on an LNG deal since the United States and Iran went to conflict earlier in 2026, an event that strangled supply through the Strait of Hormuz and pushed buyers in Asia and Europe to pay up for supply routed away from the Middle East. Woodside sits almost entirely outside that risk zone. Its production runs through Australia, the US Gulf Coast, Senegal, Mexico, and Trinidad, every barrel and every cargo originating somewhere the Strait of Hormuz cannot touch. A company trying to buy geographic insulation from a Middle East supply shock has a short list of sellers, and Woodside is near the top of it.

Exxon and Woodside are not strangers either. Exxon holds 25 percent of the Gorgon LNG project in Western Australia, operated by Chevron. On the east coast, Woodside is Exxon’s partner in the Gippsland Basin gas business, and in 2025 Woodside formally took over operatorship of the Bass Strait assets from Exxon’s local unit, Esso Australia. There is also a live commercial link running through Texas. Woodside’s Beaumont New Ammonia project, which produced first ammonia in December 2025, is designed to eventually run on carbon abated hydrogen tied to ExxonMobil’s own carbon capture facility coming online later in 2026. Two companies already inside each other’s joint ventures and supply chains make a much more boring and much more plausible acquirer and target than two strangers would.

PART TWO. THE TARGET, IN ITS OWN NUMBERS

Woodside delivered record full year production of 198.8 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2025, or 545 thousand barrels a day, helped by the Sangomar project off Senegal running near nameplate capacity at almost 99 percent reliability for most of the year. Underlying net profit after tax came in at $2.6 billion, statutory net profit at $2.7 billion, both down from a stronger comparative year as realized prices normalized. EBITDA excluding impairment held roughly flat at about $9.3 billion, an EBITDA margin north of 70 percent. Free cash flow rebounded to $1.9 billion after a negative result the year before, a swing management attributes to lower capital intensity following two large sell downs, Stonepeak taking 40 percent of the Louisiana LNG infrastructure entity and Williams taking stakes in the LNG company and the Driftwood pipeline. Those two transactions cut Woodside’s own remaining capital commitment to Louisiana LNG from the full $17.5 billion project cost down to $9.9 billion.

Unit production cost fell to $7.8 per barrel of oil equivalent. Average cash breakeven across the portfolio sits below $34 a barrel, the number management points to when asked how the company survives a weak price year. Gearing closed the year at 18.2 percent, inside the company’s own 10 to 20 percent target range, with $9.3 billion of liquidity and a triple B plus credit rating that keeps the US SEC registered bond market open. Total debt across the group runs close to $13.5 billion. The dividend for the full year reached $1.12 a share fully franked, an 80 percent payout ratio against underlying earnings, a policy management has held even through a profit decline.

The project pipeline is the real asset. Scarborough was 94 percent complete at year end, on track for first LNG in the fourth quarter of 2026. Louisiana LNG took final investment decision in April 2025 on a $17.5 billion three train, 16.5 million tonne a year foundation project, 22 percent complete at year end, targeting first LNG in 2029. Trion, offshore Mexico, is about half complete, targeting first oil in 2028. Browse, Australia’s largest undeveloped gas resource, had its ownership picture rewritten days before the Exxon rumor broke, when Woodside used its preemptive right to buy PetroChina’s 10.67 percent stake ahead of a competing bid from Japan’s Inpex, lifting Woodside’s own holding to roughly 42 percent. Browse carries an estimated development cost near $35 billion and has not yet reached final investment decision.

Market value sat near A$56 billion, about $40 billion, in the days immediately around the denial, after spiking toward A$59 billion, about $42 billion, on the Friday the Bloomberg story broke. Shares outstanding run close to 1.9 billion. The stock trades around 12 to 14 times trailing earnings depending on the day chosen, against a five year range that has swung from the low twenties down into the single digits during the worst of the 2020 demand shock.

PART THREE. THE ACQUIRER, IN ITS OWN NUMBERS

ExxonMobil enters this conversation with a market capitalization sitting in the $610 to $635 billion range through June 2026, on roughly 4.145 billion diluted shares outstanding after the company’s own share count fell from 8,019 million issued shares against 3,874 million held in treasury as of the most recent quarter. That implies a share price near $148. Full year 2025 GAAP earnings per share came to $6.70, or $6.99 excluding identified items, against net income of $28.8 billion. Upstream production hit its highest level in more than forty years at 4.7 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, with Permian output at 1.6 million barrels a day and Guyana production crossing 700 thousand barrels a day, both annual records. Advantaged assets, defined by the company as Permian, Guyana, and LNG, made up 59 percent of total production in 2025, up roughly seven points from the year before, the clearest evidence that LNG is already a named pillar of the portfolio rather than an afterthought.

Cash capital expenditure totaled $29.0 billion in 2025, including $2.6 billion of bolt on acquisitions, with guidance of $27 to $29 billion for 2026. The buyback program is running at $20 billion a year through 2026. At a current price near $148 and trailing GAAP earnings of $6.70 a share, the stock trades around 22 times earnings, a materially richer multiple than the 12 to 16 times Exxon has historically commanded across most of the last two decades. That gap between Exxon’s own rating and Woodside’s matters enormously for everything that follows, because it is the entire mechanical reason a stock funded deal could look accretive even before a single dollar of synergy gets counted.

PART FOUR. WHAT THE LAST THREE BIG DEALS ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE

Every cross border energy mega deal gets compared to precedent the moment it leaks, so the precedent table needs to be precise rather than remembered.

ExxonMobil and Pioneer Natural Resources, announced October 11 2023. All stock, $59.5 billion equity value, $253 a share based on Exxon’s closing price the prior week, exchange ratio of 2.3234 Exxon shares for every Pioneer share. Implied enterprise value including net debt was $64.5 billion. The termination fee Pioneer would have owed Exxon under specified circumstances was $1.815 billion, three percent of equity value. The deal closed in roughly seven months, by May 2024, with essentially no regulatory friction beyond a standard antitrust review focused narrowly on Permian acreage concentration. Pioneer shareholders ended up owning a low double digit share of the combined company.

Chevron and Hess, announced October 23 2023. All stock, $53 billion equity value, $171 a share, exchange ratio of 1.0250 Chevron shares for every Hess share, enterprise value of $60 billion. Hess shareholders were set to receive in aggregate around 15 percent of the combined Chevron. The premium to Hess’s undisturbed closing price was 4.9 percent, the thinnest premium in this entire set, reflecting how strongly the market already expected some kind of consolidation move for Hess’s Guyana position. The deal did not close until April 28 2026, two and a half years after announcement, because ExxonMobil itself, alongside CNOOC, argued in arbitration that it held a preemptive right over Hess’s stake in the Stabroek Block joint venture in Guyana that the Chevron transaction would trigger. The arbitration panel ultimately sided with Chevron, but the delay is the single most important data point in this entire report for what happens when a major joint venture partner decides to use its contractual rights to slow down somebody else’s deal.

BHP Petroleum and Woodside, announced November 2021, completed June 1 2022. Structured as an asset for shares merger rather than a premium takeover, with BHP folding its entire oil and gas portfolio into Woodside in exchange for newly issued Woodside shares, 914,768,948 of them, at a ratio of one new Woodside share for every 5.5340 BHP shares held. On completion, existing Woodside shareholders held about 52 percent of the combined company and former BHP shareholders held about 48 percent. The mutual termination fee was a modest $160 million, reflecting the cooperative, negotiated nature of the deal rather than a contested bid.

Shell and Woodside, 2001. Shell, already sitting on roughly a third of Woodside’s register, moved to take full control in a deal valued near A$3.2 billion. Federal Treasurer Peter Costello blocked it on national interest grounds, judging that Shell would likely prioritize investment decisions in its own global portfolio over Western Australia’s. Woodside’s then chairman publicly disputed that characterization. The government held the line anyway. This is the precedent every Australian politician reaches for the instant a foreign buyer’s name gets attached to Woodside, and Premier Cook reached for it within forty eight hours of the Bloomberg story.

PART FIVE. PREMIUM AND DEAL SIZE, WORKED OUT IN FULL

Start from an undisturbed Woodside market capitalization of A$56 billion against 1.9 billion shares outstanding, implying an undisturbed share price of A$29.47. Convert using the AUD to USD rate implied by the sourced figures themselves, roughly 0.71, which is consistent with the A$56 billion equaling approximately $40 billion cited across multiple outlets the week of the denial.

Offer Price (AUD) = Undisturbed Price × (1 + Premium)

Equity Value (AUD) = Offer Price (AUD) × Shares Outstanding

Equity Value (USD) = Equity Value (AUD) × 0.71

Running that across a premium range wide enough to cover everything from a friendly negotiated deal to a price high enough to buy off political resistance:

Premium 15 percent: Offer price A$33.89. Equity value A$64.4 billion, approximately $45.7 billion.

Premium 25 percent: Offer price A$36.84. Equity value A$70.0 billion, approximately $49.7 billion.

Premium 35 percent: Offer price A$39.78. Equity value A$75.6 billion, approximately $53.7 billion.

Premium 45 percent: Offer price A$42.73. Equity value A$81.2 billion, approximately $57.6 billion.

Premium 55 percent: Offer price A$45.68. Equity value A$86.8 billion, approximately $61.6 billion.

For context, the Pioneer deal carried a premium commentators placed anywhere from roughly 9 percent to as high as 18 to 22 percent depending on which reference price and which fair value baseline is used, a reminder that premium math is itself a contested number even in a completed deal with full disclosure. The Hess deal carried a clean, well sourced 4.9 percent premium because Hess traded as something close to a known merger candidate already. A Woodside deal would likely sit well above either, given the cross border and political complexity a buyer has to compensate for, which is why the working range above starts at 15 percent rather than at the single digits seen in the cleanest of the domestic deals.

PART SIX. WHAT AN ALL STOCK DEAL WOULD DO TO EXXON’S OWN SHARE COUNT

Exchange Ratio = Offer Price per Woodside Share (USD) ÷ Exxon Share Price (USD)

New Exxon Shares Issued = Equity Value (USD) ÷ Exxon Share Price (USD)

Pro Forma Woodside Ownership Share = New Shares Issued ÷ (Exxon Existing Diluted Shares + New Shares Issued)

Holding Exxon’s share price at $148 and existing diluted shares at 4.145 billion:

Premium 15 percent: new shares issued approximately 309 million. Pro forma Woodside ownership approximately 6.9 percent of the combined company.

Premium 25 percent: new shares approximately 336 million. Pro forma ownership approximately 7.5 percent.

Premium 35 percent: new shares approximately 363 million. Pro forma ownership approximately 8.0 percent.

Premium 45 percent: new shares approximately 390 million. Pro forma ownership approximately 8.6 percent.

Premium 55 percent: new shares approximately 416 million. Pro forma ownership approximately 9.1 percent.

Compare that to Pioneer, where Pioneer holders ended up with a low double digit stake, and to Hess, where Hess holders ended up with roughly 15 percent of the combined Chevron. A Woodside deal, even at a rich 55 percent premium, would dilute Exxon’s own shareholders by less than either of those precedents, purely because Exxon today is a much larger company relative to Woodside than Exxon was relative to Pioneer in 2023, or than Chevron was relative to Hess. Size asymmetry is doing real work here before strategy even enters the conversation.

PART SEVEN. DOES IT ACCRETE, AND DOES ACCRETION MEAN ANYTHING

Pro Forma EPS = (Exxon Net Income + Woodside Net Income) ÷ Pro Forma Diluted Shares

Using Exxon’s 2025 net income of $28.84 billion and Woodside’s 2025 statutory net income of $2.7 billion, with no adjustment yet for financing cost, purchase accounting depreciation step up, or synergies:

Premium 15 percent: pro forma shares 4.454 billion. Pro forma EPS $7.08, against Exxon’s own standalone $6.70. Accretion of roughly 5.7 percent.

Premium 35 percent: pro forma shares 4.508 billion. Pro forma EPS $7.00. Accretion of roughly 4.4 percent.

Premium 55 percent: pro forma shares 4.561 billion. Pro forma EPS $6.91. Accretion of roughly 3.2 percent.

Every scenario in this range shows accretion on a naive, unadjusted basis, and that fact alone should make any analyst suspicious rather than satisfied. The accretion exists because Exxon’s stock currently trades at roughly 22 times earnings while Woodside’s earnings yield, net income divided by equity value, runs closer to 6 to 7 percent, equivalent to roughly 14 to 16 times earnings. Issuing expensive Exxon stock to buy a cheaper earnings stream is mechanically accretive in almost any scenario, the same arithmetic that made the Pioneer deal accretive in year one and the same arithmetic that makes nearly any large company’s stock funded acquisition of a smaller, lower multiple peer look good on a slide. It says nothing about whether Woodside’s actual return on the capital being deployed exceeds what Exxon could earn buying back its own stock at 22 times earnings instead, or deploying that capital into its own Permian and Guyana programs at the return rates it has been delivering there. A real verdict on this deal requires a return on capital comparison, not an EPS accretion slide, and any banker who leads a pitch with the accretion number alone is selling, not analyzing.

PART EIGHT. A DISCOUNTED CASH FLOW WORKED IN FULL, WITH EVERY ASSUMPTION LABELED

This section builds an illustrative valuation range using a standard two stage discounted cash flow. None of the inputs below are Woodside’s own disclosed cost of capital. Every rate is an assumption chosen to be reasonable for an investment grade LNG producer in mid 2026, and is labeled as such.

Cost of equity via the capital asset pricing model:

Re = Rf + β × ERP

Assumed risk free rate Rf = 4.3 percent, an illustrative ten year government bond level.

Assumed equity risk premium ERP = 5.0 percent, illustrative.

Assumed beta for an LNG heavy integrated producer = 1.1, illustrative.

Re = 4.3 + 1.1 × 5.0 = 9.8 percent.

Cost of debt:

Assumed pretax cost of debt = 5.5 percent, consistent with Woodside’s actual triple B plus rating and its access to the US SEC registered bond market.

Australian corporate tax rate = 30 percent, a real, sourced statutory rate, not an assumption.

After tax cost of debt = 5.5 × (1 − 0.30) = 3.85 percent.

Capital structure weights taken directly from Woodside’s own disclosed gearing of 18.2 percent at year end 2025:

D/V = 18.2 percent, E/V = 81.8 percent.

WACC = (E/V) × Re + (D/V) × Rd × (1 − Tax)

WACC = 0.818 × 9.8 + 0.182 × 3.85 = 8.02 + 0.70 = 8.72 percent.

Terminal growth assumption g = 1.5 percent, illustrative, reflecting a long run structural moderation in LNG demand growth after the current decade’s buildout.

For the explicit forecast, assume free cash flow rises from the 2025 actual of $1.9 billion toward a normalized run rate of roughly $3.5 billion by the end of the decade as Scarborough, which targets first LNG in the fourth quarter of 2026, and Louisiana LNG, which targets first LNG in 2029, both move from construction into cash generation. This trajectory is an illustrative planning assumption built from the project timelines Woodside itself has disclosed, not a disclosed company forecast.

Terminal Value = FCF(terminal) × (1 + g) ÷ (WACC − g)

Using the illustrative normalized FCF of $3.5 billion:

TV = 3.5 × 1.015 ÷ (0.0872 − 0.015) = 3.5525 ÷ 0.0722 ≈ $49.2 billion.

Sensitizing that terminal value to a range of WACC and growth assumptions, since this single number drives most of the answer in any long cycle commodity business:

WACC 7.5 percent, g 1.0 percent: TV ≈ $53.8 billion.

WACC 7.5 percent, g 2.0 percent: TV ≈ $63.6 billion.

WACC 8.72 percent, g 1.5 percent: TV ≈ $49.2 billion, the base case above.

WACC 10.0 percent, g 1.0 percent: TV ≈ $38.9 billion.

WACC 10.0 percent, g 2.0 percent: TV ≈ $43.8 billion.

Add several years of explicit, ramping free cash flow discounted back at 8.72 percent, net off total debt of approximately $13.5 billion, and divide by 1.9 billion shares, and the resulting per share intrinsic value range across this sensitivity grid lands broadly in the same neighborhood as the current undisturbed trading price, drifting modestly higher in the lower WACC and higher growth corners and modestly lower in the higher WACC corners. That is the honest conclusion a clean discounted cash flow supports here: Woodside is not obviously and dramatically undervalued at its current price using conservative, defensible assumptions. Any acquirer paying a 35 to 55 percent premium is paying primarily for strategic optionality, supply security, and removal of a future competitive bidder, not for a deeply mispriced asset the market has somehow failed to notice. That distinction matters enormously for how a board should think about the deal, and it is exactly the kind of distinction a one line news story about a premium never bothers to make.

PART NINE. THE STRESS TEST

A discounted cash flow tells you what the cash flows are worth. It tells you nothing about whether the deal actually closes, and in this specific case the path to closing is more dangerous than the valuation math.

Start with the politics, because the politics moved first. Within forty eight hours of the Bloomberg report, Western Australia’s Premier was on record promising to fight any deal that relocated Woodside’s headquarters out of Perth, explicitly invoking the 2001 Shell precedent and stating plainly that the reasons that deal was blocked have not changed. Any transaction will also require approval from Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board, a process industry analysts have already flagged as carrying real risk given that Australia has only two large listed domestic energy producers and a government that may be reluctant to approve the larger of the two disappearing into a foreign balance sheet. The test FIRB and the Treasurer apply is explicitly about competitive impact and national interest, not pure commercial logic, which is precisely the test that killed the Shell deal in 2001 despite Shell already being a large shareholder at the time.

Layer on the joint venture structure underneath Woodside’s own asset base. North West Shelf, Pluto, Gorgon, Scarborough, and Browse all carry multiple non operator partners, including Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP’s former interests now embedded in Woodside itself, and Japanese partners through Mitsubishi and Mitsui structures. Joint venture agreements of this size routinely carry preemptive rights and change in control consent provisions, the exact mechanism that let ExxonMobil and CNOOC stall the Chevron Hess deal for two and a half years in arbitration over Hess’s own Guyana joint venture stake. The irony of that precedent is hard to overstate. Exxon has direct, recent, institutional experience using preemptive rights inside a major LNG and oil joint venture to delay a competitor’s acquisition by years. Any banker advising Exxon on a Woodside bid would have to model the realistic possibility that Shell, Chevron, BP, or a Japanese partner inside Woodside’s own joint ventures does to Exxon exactly what Exxon did to Chevron, simply because the contractual tools sitting inside these structures are common to the entire industry, not unique to Guyana.

Add execution risk on the asset side. Scarborough is 94 percent complete and close to first cargo, a relatively low risk near term catalyst. Louisiana LNG and Browse are not. Louisiana LNG sits at 22 percent completion against a 2029 target, already restructured twice through asset sell downs to manage capital intensity. Browse has not reached final investment decision and carries an estimated $35 billion development cost against a backdrop of softening conviction in some markets about the multi decade demand case for new LNG supply. An acquirer paying a control premium today is paying for execution that has not happened yet on two of Woodside’s three largest growth legs.

Finally, weigh the credibility of the rumor itself against the explicit, on the record denial from the only party with a fiduciary duty to correct a false market rumor. Woodside’s statement that it is not aware of any proposal and is not in discussions is about as close to an unambiguous denial as corporate disclosure law allows a company to make, and companies do not make statements that direct lightly given the legal exposure of a false denial. The single most likely outcome, on the balance of everything written here, is that this remains exactly what it was the day it leaked: an internal study inside Exxon’s strategy team that may or may not survive contact with the FIRB process, the joint venture partners, and a Western Australian government that has already shown it will fight.

PART TEN. A PROBABILITY WEIGHTED VIEW

Assign rough, explicitly subjective probabilities to a small set of outcomes over the next eighteen to twenty four months, the timeframe comparable large cross border energy deals have taken from rumor to either signing or abandonment.

No formal approach ever materializes, the internal study quietly dies the way most internal studies at this scale do: probability 50 percent.

Exxon makes a formal approach, Woodside’s board engages, and the deal is reshaped into a partial transaction, most likely a stake in a single asset such as Louisiana LNG or an increased position in an existing joint venture, rather than a full takeover, specifically to avoid the FIRB and Western Australian political exposure of a full change in control: probability 25 percent.

A full takeover offer is made, FIRB and the Western Australian government extract concessions on headquarters location, local jobs, and domestic supply commitments, and a deal eventually closes at a premium in the 25 to 45 percent range, taking twelve to twenty four months given the joint venture and regulatory complexity: probability 15 percent.

A full takeover offer is made and is ultimately blocked or withdrawn following the same national interest logic that killed the Shell bid in 2001: probability 10 percent.

Weighting the equity value outcomes from Part Five against these probabilities produces an expected outcome heavily skewed toward the status quo, which is the correct way to read every Woodside trading session for the next year. The stock should trade with a thin, decaying speculative premium layered over its standalone fundamental value, and that premium should compress every time a quarter passes without a formal announcement, exactly the pattern visible already between the Friday spike and the following week’s retracement back toward the undisturbed price.

THE VERDICT

Every number in this report says the same thing from a different angle. The accretion math works because Exxon’s stock is expensive and Woodside’s is not, not because Woodside is cheap on an absolute basis. The discounted cash flow says Woodside is fairly priced today under conservative assumptions, so any premium above the mid teens is a payment for control and supply security, not a bargain. The dilution to Exxon shareholders is small because Exxon has gotten large, not because the deal is small in absolute dollars. And the single best predictor of how this ends sits not in either company’s financial statements but in a press release from a Western Australian state government invoking a takeover its own state government blocked twenty five years ago, for the exact same reasons, against the exact same kind of foreign buyer. Money moves fast. Political memory in Perth moves slower, and on this particular question it has not moved at all.

SOURCES

Bloomberg, Exxon Is Said to Study Takeover Targets Including Woodside, June 12 2026. Reuters via multiple outlets including BOE Report, theedgemalaysia, and Stockopedia, Western Australia opposes possible Exxon takeover of Woodside Energy, June 14 2026. Rigzone, Woodside Says No Takeover Offer from ExxonMobil, June 15 2026. Bloomberg, LNG Major Woodside Says No Takeover Bid Received From Exxon, June 14 2026. Mining Weekly, Australia’s Woodside Energy unaware of any proposal involving Exxon Mobil, June 15 2026. Woodside Energy 2025 full year results announcement, briefing presentation, and briefing transcript, February 24 2026. Woodside Energy half year 2025 report, August 2025. ExxonMobil Announces 2025 Results, January 30 2026, and accompanying SEC Form 8-K filings for first, second, third, and fourth quarter 2025. ExxonMobil Form 10-Q, quarter ended March 31 2026, share count disclosure. ExxonMobil Announces Merger with Pioneer Natural Resources in an All Stock Transaction, October 11 2023, and Pioneer Natural Resources Form 425 and Form 8-K filings, October 2023. Chevron Announces Agreement to Acquire Hess, October 23 2023, and Hess Corporation Form 8-K, October 2023. M&A Watch, Chevron’s $53 Billion Acquisition of Hess, legal report, 2025. Ad Hoc News, Hess Corporation Stock, Chevron Closes $53 Billion Acquisition Deal, April 2026. BHP, BHP Petroleum merger with Woodside, frequently asked questions and completion announcements, 2021 to 2022. Woodside Petroleum Form 424B3 and Form 6K filings, 2022. Companies Market Cap and StockAnalysis.com, ExxonMobil and Woodside Energy market capitalization data, June 2026. Google Finance, Woodside Energy Group Ltd WDS:ASX, June 18 2026.

This is a working model, not a research product distributed for trading purposes. Every number above traces to a public source listed here or is explicitly labeled as an illustrative assumption. Nothing in this document should be read as investment advice.