Exxon’s Darren Woods & NYC’s Marathon Weekend 10/31/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. The global politics of oil. Who has it? Who needs it? Where are the danger zones? Exxon CEO Darren Woods in an exclusive conversation. The U.S. and many of the European countries are standing up to any bullying that might come out of Venezuela to make sure that that Caribbean area remains free. New York's biggest street party is big business. Marathon Sunday approaches. NY Roadrunners CEO Rob Simmelker. New York Roadrunners' impact on the economy here, that is year-round. $1 billion in impact. $700 million of that is coming from the marathon.

0:44Plus, FANG stocks still have bite. But for all the moments where people count Apple out, that has been a bad trade. And tips for longer-lasting pumpkins from jack-o'-lanterns.com. You have to cut the hole in the bottom. Okay, news you can use, folks, because I always do it on the top. It's Friday, October 31st, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back to you by in 3, 2, 1. Cue, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. Happy Halloween, everybody. I'm Becky Quick along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Joe is off today.

1:27You're not wearing any orange. I thought I didn't do it either. I forgot about it actually until the drive-in. I've done so many things, made boo bags for the kids, got the gifts ready, the candy basket ready, the costumes, and here we are. But we got pumpkins. We've got some pumpkins for you later and some surprises along the way. Just wait and see. So we didn't forget entirely. We're just, we're playing this off. It's a surprise Halloween until we get there. Let's take a look at where the futures stand this morning. You're actually going to see the Nasdaq indicated up by over 300 points this morning.

1:59Meantime, President Trump calling for Republicans to change the rules in the Senate to reopen the government. In a post last night, he says the following. It is now time for the Republicans to play their Trump card and go for what is called the nuclear option. Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of it now. Now, filibuster is the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on a bill effectively allowing a minority party to block legislation as long as they have the support of at least 41 senators. Now, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has warned against eliminating that filibuster, saying it could come back to bite Republicans in the future when their party is in the minority.

2:36In his post late night, last night, I should say, President Trump saying that if Democrats ever come back into power, they would eliminate the filibuster rule the first day in office anyway. Trump said that he wants to do it now in order to take advantage of the Democrats. And Amazon shares are soaring this morning. It's hard to see a big cap of this size get this kind of growth. But 12.6 % is the jump that you are seeing this morning. That came after Amazon's earnings and revenue both beat expectations. In fact, earnings per share beat by a lot. It was$1.95 versus the$1.57 that the street had been expecting.

3:16And it was a lot of this because of AWS, Amazon Web Services, the revenue there up 20 % to$33 billion. That beat not only the streets' expectations, but even the whisper numbers that had been out there about this. The CEO, Andy Jassy, saying that he expects to keep up this pace for a while, which could set the company up for its first ever$200 billion quarter in the current quarter, the fourth quarter on this. AWS is growing at a pace we haven't seen since 2022. re-accelerating to 20.2 % year-over-year, our largest growth rate in 11 quarters. Backlog grew to$200 billion by Q3 quarter end and doesn't include several unannounced new deals in October, which together are more than our total deal volume for all of Q3.

4:05There had been a lot of concerns about what was happening, particularly at AWS, and that's why the stock has not done nearly as well as some of the other MAG7s this year. With these gains, You're now looking at a year to date gain of about 14 percent. But that idea of acceleration and Jassy saying he expects it to continue. That's what's got the street so excited this morning. There are a lot of deals that they didn't even talk about, but they said the numbers, including with some of the deals that haven't been announced in October. If you look at those, it'd be more than the entire quarter that was even there before.

4:39and what they're talking about with some of these things really makes you wonder just the idea for demand saying demand is here we can't satiate it quickly enough we've got 200 billion dollars in a backlog back order for these things that we haven't gotten to yet and that's what the street keeps waiting to hear from all of these companies you had very big quarters from both Microsoft and Google this quarter when it came to their Google their cloud offerings too so this is the battle It's profitable. Jensen Wong, I don't know if you heard him yesterday, said this was the quarter that AI became profitable.

5:12And that's why you have so much money that's chasing this. Once you have something that's profitable, you're going to have lots and lots of places that are building out trying to accommodate it. Profitable for these guys. Yes. It's not profitable for the other side yet. We'll see. We'll see. And profitable for Jensen Wong's company. It's been profitable for them for a very long time. The one thing that he did say that really caught me kind of off guard is this idea that those job cuts that they had announced, he said it wasn't for financial reasons and it wasn't because of AI. Remember earlier in the summer he had talked about AI maybe eventually meaning that they'd have fewer employees.

5:50He said it's just cultural. No, he's been talking about trying to do that for a while. Slam down bureaucracy, basically, and flatten out the organization. He's been concerned for the last year or two. He's been writing about it in some of those letters that we've talked to him about, about this whole concept, just that the whole company got a little too sprawling, in particular during the pandemic. Right. Meantime, take a look at shares of Apple because they are higher. Earnings and revenue beating estimates lifted in part by strong sales of the iPhone 17. Now, CEO Tim Cook telling our own Steve Kovac that revenue in the current quarter will rise by at least 10 percent.

6:21He said that would make the December quarter the best in the history of that company. Cook also said sales in China should return to growth. Q4 China sales falling 3.6 percent to$14.5 billion. Now, that part was below street estimates. We're looking at that stock up now about 2 percent. We're sitting in just about$276.63. But for all the moments where people count Apple out, that has been a bad trade. It has. In the meantime, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang locking down several deals with South Korean companies. That includes Samsung, which is going to be building a new AI mega factory and deploying 50 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

7:03Huang also speaking with our own Eunice Yun overnight. These are his first comments since the Trump Xi sit down. He said it is up to President Trump whether the Blackwell chip goes on sale in China. I think it's really good for the United States and for China that NVIDIA could bring AI technology to China. for many reasons. One reason, of course, is that the China market is large and it's a vibrant market with a lot of developers. And those developers create AI technology that's exported from China all over the world. And so to the extent that American tech stack can run and operate those AI models, it's good for the United States around the world.

7:50Take a look at shares of NVIDIA this morning. At this point, up by about 2 percent. And again, for the one year, that stock is up by 56 percent. Meantime, Netflix announcing a 10 for one stock split. Shareholders, as of November 10th, they're going to receive nine additional shares for every one that they hold. The move changes nothing technically or fundamentally really about the company, but could make the pricey shares more accessible to retail investors. Some investors pointed out that the split would make Netflix a more attractive candidate for inclusion in the Dow, which is price weighted average.

8:23Right now, of course, that stock is sitting just over$1 ,000 for each share,$1 ,116. Separately, Reuters reporting that Netflix is actively exploring a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery Studio and streaming business. The report says that Netflix has hired Mollus and company to evaluate a prospective offer. Reuters says that Netflix has been granted access to the data room, which contains financial details needed to make a bid. CEO Ted Sarandos told investors last week that Netflix would not be interested in acquiring Warner Brothers cable TV networks, which include CNN, of course, and TNT Food Network and others.

8:56And so it seems to me the board of Warner Brothers Discovery is going to have a very interesting choice to make. They're either going to have to decide I'm going to take a full buyout from David Ellison at currently 2350. Maybe it goes up to 25, 26, 27 dollars. I don't know how high, how high he'd be willing to go. Or do you take a bid just for the studios and streaming business and then take the risk that the spin out works and that collectively the two of those things is more ultimately than doing a sort of one shot deal? That's going to be the question. And then the question is who's willing to pay or potentially even overpay for the studio and streaming business, which is the crown jewel of the situation.

9:44And I do think, you know, if you are Peacock, NBC, there's a real incentive to do that. Because if you do not, that's a subscale business. Right. And so at some point. There are fewer places. Like, where do you go? Where do you go afterwards? I don't know whether Netflix needs this as much as anybody else. Amazon, I think, actually will be ultimately interested in all this. But this could get interesting. But a lot of bidders is what you're thinking. I actually think there's going to be a bunch of people around the table. The question is whether the bids for the streaming and studio business, plus whatever you think the valuation of the linear business is, will ever add up to the David Ellison bid for the whole thing and also the execution risk that will be involved.

10:27In multiple transactions. Exactly. Yeah. That's the question. It is. And it'll be interesting to hear what shareholders think about some of this, too, what kind of pressure they bring to bear, if any. Well, the question is, are shareholders too short-term oriented to just say, we'll just take the easy answer. The longer play. We'll just take the one, the money on the table with one check, right? So we'll see. Well,

10:55Halloween is here, and it is a big holiday, not just for anybody who's in the mood or in the spirit, but anybody who's counting. Consumers are actually expected to spend$13.1 billion on Halloween this year. Our next guest makes it his business to make Halloween gorgeous. And yeah, that's right. Gord, jack-o'-lantern, get it? Joining us right now is jack-o'-lanterns.com president Mike Pollack. His company has organized two Halloween experiences this spooky season, one on New York's Long Island, one in Chicago, treating, not tricking, tens of thousands of visitors this month. And thank you very much for joining us, Mike.

11:31It's great to see you. Thanks for having me back. So we've seen you before, but it's been a little while. How has this holiday grown, let's say, over the last five years? Well, it's probably second-nulling to Christmas, I would say, and the live events business just keeps getting bigger. But this year has been a little bit different because the consumer wants to use their money a little bit more efficiently, and I think people are really looking for value this year. Really? So how do you see that? How do you measure it? I measure it in the ticket sales, and I see, like, how many tickets are being sold or not sold.

12:00I'm seeing that there's a lot of our customer base is really looking for a premium experience. So the people who do have money are willing to spend it for a bigger, better experience. What do you get for a premium experience? Because we should mention, how many pumpkins are live, jack-o'-lanterns are live at each of these events? So the one on Long Island has about 7 ,000 jack-o'-lanterns. Real ones. Real ones. And the one in Chicago, Chicago Botanic Gardens, has 1 ,000. Wow. Wow. That takes some serious manpower to pull that off. But when you say a premium experience, what do you get for that premium experience?

12:35Well, you could probably get a ticket that allows you to come in whenever you want. So most of the tickets are time tickets. But a lot of people spend up and get that flex ticket for that flexibility. So if it rains, they can come on a different day. They can come on a sold-out time slot. They want some food and beverage experience that goes with it. They want some merchandise with it. And they don't want to wait on any lines. Wow. What's it cost for a premium ticket? Yeah, it's about$50 for where we are, but there's other places that charge a lot more. Seventy nine over a hundred for a ticket for one of these shows.

13:07Yeah, I think I've seen even more for the premium experience to go along with it. How many people can you service? And what are we talking about the entire month of October? The entire month. Yeah, mostly it's Thursday through Sunday. And we could probably do about 50 ,000 people through our Long Island show at a time. And we're probably about right at that range right now. There's only two nights left tonight and tomorrow night. When you say that you're seeing the customer look for something that feels more value, is that different than sort of this? It felt like there was a YOLO economy going on sort of post-pandemic.

13:40Is that the distinction we're talking about here? Well, the customers who do have the money, they're willing to spend it. And they also don't care too much about the price. So, like, there is always a customer who wants to come in at the cheapest price. and then there's a customer that wants to come in, and they don't care if it's like$10,$15 more, as long as they see the value that they're getting for those extra dollars. How many artisans do you have carving? We have over 90 pumpkin carvers on the team here in Long Island. How long does it take to carve one of these pumpkins? So the small ones that we have here take about an hour or two for a design like that.

14:17And the big one that you saw with your faces on it took about eight hours. Wow. And they're all hand-painted and hand-carved. And do they stencil them for, tell me how to do it. Because we, you know, what we do at home doesn't look like this. Right. You can imagine. So our artists, we print out something and we stick it onto the pumpkin. And then we use some charcoal. And then there are just really good artists who have done this for, some of them for a decade. And they just hand paint it on there. Some of them can just look at a picture and paint just like that. It's amazing. And then they can just use some sculpt tools and carve it around.

14:50How do you keep it from going bad? So the first thing you've got to do with a regular pumpkin like this is you have to cut the hole in the bottom. Don't do it on the top. Don't do it on the top because you want to gut it out. You can use, folks, because I always do it on the top. Yeah, don't do it on top because you want all those juices in the liquid to fall out over time. Okay. The other thing that you might want to do is definitely keep it cool, keep it out of sunlight for sure, and get as much of the guts out as you can. and then also carve towards the top of the pumpkin and leave a little bit of space at the bottom so it's a little stronger at the bottom.

15:25But do you lacquer these things? We do not. Really? The nice art pumpkin with your faces on it, we would spray some clear coat onto that so it stays a little fresh. And we're only asking five days out of these pumpkins. So they get carved on like a Tuesday. We put them out on a Wednesday. They get disposed on a Monday and we cycle them every week. Wow. Mike, we want to thank you for coming in. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Great tie. Thank you. Appreciate it. To see the custom Squawk Box carved pumpkins featuring the gorgeous faces of Joe, Becky, and Andrew, check out our show notes for a link to a video clip of this segment or follow us on X.

16:03Our handle is Squawk CNBC. Clips are there as well. And next on Squawk Pod, America's largest energy company, Exxon, reporting quarterly results today. CEO and Chairman Darren Woods on the politics of oil. And his company is not immune to job cuts. Those reductions are about 3 % to 4 % of our global workforce. And they're not driven by cost cutting. They're driven by effectiveness. We'll be right back.

16:34You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Here's Becky Quick. ExxonMobil out with third quarter results this morning. And joining us right now to talk about it is Darren Woods. He's ExxonMobil's chairman and CEO. And Darren, welcome. It's really great to have you here today. Thank you, Becky. Good to see you again. Good to see you, too. Let's talk a little bit about the numbers you guys beat on the bottom line, adjusted earnings per share,$1.88 versus the consensus of$1.82. Revenue looked like it was a little short of Wall Street's call, at least according to some analyst expectations, 85.3 versus 86.5.

17:09How would you characterize the quarter? I'd say it's a very, very strong quarter. In fact, if you go back in time and look at all the quarters since we merged with Exxon and Mobile merged in a similar price environment, this is the highest earnings per share we've ever delivered. It reflects a lot of the hard work we've been doing since 2019. We continue to reduce costs. This year, I expect we'll have another$2.5 billion of cost reductions. If you go back to 2019, that's the accumulative cost reduction of over$14 billion. dollars nobody in our industry in fact if you take all of our industry competitors and add them together we're still out competing them on cost reductions and then we're growing the top line if you look at our production coming out of the permian it's at record levels coming out of guyana at record level so i think a very very strong quarter in a a mixed price environment and importantly we're laying the foundation for the growth out to 2030 our plans today uh in will grow earnings by$20 billion through 2030 and cash flow by$30 billion.

18:11And a really critical part of that are these enormous mega projects that we have to bring on. This year, we had to deliver 10 projects, advantage projects that are going to deliver, form the foundation for this growth. We're through eight of those so far, and we've delivered all those consistent with our plans on or ahead of schedule, on or ahead of budget. Frankly, nobody else in our industry has had that kind of track record. Yeah, you know, I looked at the results and I thought they were pretty good, too, which surprised me to see the street trading the stock off by 1.6 percent. I've been digging around trying to figure out why you'd see a sell off.

18:47Maybe you can enlighten us with what you think. The only thing I could come up with was something from Barron's where they just point out that Exxon Mobil is growing production at a time of potentially falling oil prices. Historically, that's led to problems in the past with some of these companies, with some companies. What's your explanation of what the street's instant reaction is to this, Darren? Well, I think at any moment in time, what we've seen here, I suspect today, and what we've seen here in the last several weeks and months, frankly, is just the uncertainty in the market, where the supply and demand balances are going to land with respect, and people taking bets as to what they think is going to happen going forward.

19:25Frankly, we don't spend a lot of time worrying about or trying to predict what short-term prices are going to do. We stay very focused on the long term. And frankly, if you look at the work we've been doing to drive our costs down and drive production down, our profitability on a barrel of oil has more than doubled since 2019 on a constant price basis. And from a break-even standpoint, our cost of production is very, very low. And so even today at today's prices, we feel really good about the economics, the returns that we're generating, the plans that we lay out going forward in the future. The prices are very consistent with what we've seen here.

20:06And in fact, we're resilient much, much further down in the price deck. So we feel good about the returns that we're generating. I think if you compare other companies, they don't have the same, I think, break-even costs that we do. And so they may be more challenged in these environments, but we're still generating very, very strong returns. What is your breakeven cost? All the projects that we're investing in have to generate a double-digit returns at$35 a barrel. Wow. And that's for your portfolio right now or the portfolio as you see it five years from now, ten years from now? The investments that, as you know, Becky, we've been making investments, probably investing at a higher rate than our competitors.

20:51And the criteria that we've set for ourselves for our investments in the upstream and, frankly, across all of our businesses is we have to be at the low end of the cost of supply curve. In these commodity markets where the market supply and the market demand sets the price, we're basically price takers. Our job is to be at the far left-hand side of the cost of supply curve. So whoever's out there setting that last barrel price, that we have a healthy margin. And so all the projects we've been investing in since, frankly, I've been in this job, have been driven by this very low cost of supply. That's the hurdle that our businesses have to get over in generating these projects.

21:28And it's why we put so much emphasis on technology. If you don't have a technology advantage, you can't bring the scale, you can't bring the best thinking of your organization to develop innovative advantage projects, then we won't have a long-term future. And frankly, all the work we've been doing is enhancing those capabilities, and that's manifesting themselves in very advantaged projects. Hey, Darren, we don't have a lot of data points from the government, obviously, because they've been shut down. We've been trying to do our best to kind of get a feel for what the jobs market, other areas look like from the CEOs we talked to.

22:01You all did announce last month that you were going to have layoffs of about 2 ,000 people. This was a restructuring in the EU and in Canada, I believe. Maybe this fits into what you're talking about with trying to make sure you're in the right places with the right projects. But from the jobs perspective, how do you see the environment right now? What's Exxon doing? So with respect to the announcement, you know, the work we've been doing since 2019 has really been focused on transforming how we work, and becoming much more effective and more efficient at the same time. This last announcement was more of a focus on where we work.

22:41So as we've changed our work processes, drive our teams to be more innovative, increase the teamwork, the footprint that we were in is, frankly, decades old. And so we are shifting our footprint consistent with now how we work. And so that has an impact broadly around the U.S. Those reductions are about 3 % to 4 % of our global workforce. So they're not driven by cost cutting, they're driven by effectiveness. And of course, with that comes some efficiency. There are no impacts here in the U.S. We had made those changes already by consolidating all of our offices down to the campus that we have in Houston.

23:17With respect to the broader market, frankly, if you look at demand for our businesses, demand remains very, very healthy with growing economies, continued growth in economies all around the world. and our ability to attract employees from the wage level all the way into professionals. We're not seeing any challenges with respect to that. So things look pretty good right now for the business in terms of how we're running it. Big challenge in the marketplace and what's driving that commodity cycle is the amount of supply that's coming onto the market, frankly. And the amount of supply that's coming onto the market, the big majors like yourself, obviously hitting these new production records that you all are bringing out, but you're not a nation state.

24:02The supply that you're bringing on versus what we're going to hear from OPEC plus this weekend. Well, you know, what we're looking at and the decisions that we make to bring supply on is driven by pure economics in terms of the returns that we're going to generate. We have a very large portfolio of unconventional resources, which are much more short cycle. And so we have the opportunity to turn those on and turn those off consistent with what we're seeing in the marketplace. We haven't reached the point yet where we see the economics leading us to do anything with supply. With respect to what OPEC and the others are doing, I don't have much insight into that.

24:38I obviously can see the decisions they make after they make them. I think what I've seen is they're trying to take a very moderated pace to managing the market and trying to keep the world supply and demand balances at the right level. Darren, in the past, in recent quarters, you've spoken with us about some of the European regulation, especially with climate regulation, and just how different this was than what we've seen in the past. You've been very vocal about this, how bad some of this policy you think is. And you've been getting some help from the Trump administration. Can you give us an update with where things stand, whether or not you think you're being heard on this?