Chevron Corporation

Chevron Corporation is an American integrated energy company — one of the handful of Western "supermajors" — that explores for, produces, refines, transports and markets crude oil, natural gas and refined products worldwide, generating $184.4 billion in total revenues and $12.3 billion of net income in fiscal 2025. It is the second-largest U.S. oil company by market value, a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and since 2024 a Houston-headquartered business after more than a century rooted in California.

This file is being opened in the middle of the most consequential year in Chevron's recent history. In July 2025 the company closed its roughly $48 billion all-stock acquisition of Hess Corporation, winning a contested arbitration with ExxonMobil to do so, and in the same year it finished the multi-decade Future Growth Project at its Tengiz field in Kazakhstan and pushed Permian shale output past a million barrels a day. The result is a company that is simultaneously bigger, more levered, and pointed at a different set of barrels than it was eighteen months ago.

The central question the file turns on is whether that transformation makes Chevron a structurally higher-margin, lower-breakeven cash compounder — or whether management has added integration risk and roughly four times the net debt right as a long commodity up-cycle rolls over. Earnings have already fallen by two-thirds from their 2022 peak. What you decide about Chevron depends almost entirely on what you think the next few years of oil prices, and the new portfolio's cash margins, will do to the gap between the two.