CHEVRON'S DAVE O'REILLY: PUMPED UP

摘要

Dave O'Reilly isn't taking a vacation this summer. In fact, the Chevron CEO isn't even taking a day off to savor one of the biggest wins of his career. Less than 24 hours after beating China's CNOOC and buying Unocal in the hardest-fought, most bitter takeover battle in years, the only pause O'Reilly allows himself is a few mo- ments to congratulate the company's seven top managers at their biweekly meeting. "It's day one," O'Reilly tells his lieutenants as they gather around a horseshoe-shaped, blond-wood conference table in the com- pany's ultramodern San Ramon, Calif., headquarters. "We got the company. Now we've got to make it work." Indeed they do. Shareholders are still smarting over O'Reilly's disastrous decision in 2001 to invest $1.5 billion in Dynegy, the faltering power company, and doubts persist about whether Chevron can deliver the new oil and gas production it has been promising ever since it acquired Texaco that same year. But on this hot August morning, the Dublin-born O'Reilly is enjoying a bit of good luck: Crude prices are soaring, and by the end of the day they will stand at just under $66 a bar-rel, an all-time high. At many of Chevron and Texaco's 9,000 service stations across America, drivers are anteing up nearly $2.75 a gallon for gasoline. For Chevron's U.S. refineries, which O'Reilly ran for much of the 1990s, that's like a license to print money.