The world’s most profitable company will make its first public stock offering next month, in what could be the biggest IPO ever.

Saudi Aramco, the oil giant owned by the Saudi government, said on Sunday it will sell an unspecified number of shares, thought to be between 1% and 3% of the company. It did not specify a price range.

The company’s initial offering will be on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul exchange. “We are proud of the listing of Aramco,” said CEO and President Amin Nasser said. “It will increase our visibility internationally.”

It has taken years to get to this moment. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2016 that he wanted the company to go public in 2017, and that it would be valued at $2 trillion. But getting its books ready has taken until now, and bankers have advised that the valuation should instead be around $1.5 trillion.

Aramco supplies about 10% of the world’s crude oil. In 2018, the company made $111 billion. That’s more than J.P. Morgan Chase, Facebook, ExxonMobil and Google parent company Alphabet put together, as CNBC pointed out.

The firm’s finances have long been guarded, but it began sharing its numbers in preparations for the IPO.

Its disclosures show that it costs Aramco $2.80 to get a barrel of oil from the ground, which it can then sell for $62 per barrel, according to The Guardian.

“It produces oil for so much less than anyone else out there,” says Ellen Wald, author of Saudi, Inc., a book about the history of Saudi Arabia and Aramco. “I mean in the United States a fracking company is lucky if it can break even at $50 a barrel.”

That’s just one part of what makes Aramco so profitable. The company also benefits from investments it has made in its infrastructure, which makes it cheap to pump its oil. Then there’s the accessibility of its oil reserves.

“These are the largest conventional oil resources on the planet,” Wald says.

The public offering is part of an effort by the crown prince to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy and make it less dependent on oil. The move comes less than two months after Aramco’s oil facilities were attacked by drone strikes, which for a time halved the country’s oil exports. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility, but Saudi Arabia pointed the finger squarely at Iran.

Those attacks, among other geopolitical issues, have raised questions about the safety of an investment in Aramco.

Credit rating agency Fitch recently downgraded Saudi Arabia’s rating from A+ to A, citing “increased geopolitical and military tensions in the Gulf region,” in addition to “the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia’s economic infrastructure, and continued deterioration in Saudi Arabia’s fiscal and external balance sheets.”

Aramco chairman Yasir al-Rumayyan downplayed those concerns at a press conference Sunday.

After the attacks on its oil facilities, “oil prices went up the first two days by about 20%. Then it came down by 10%,” Rumayyan said. “We have one eighth of the oil production in the world, and the oil traders saw this as a non-event. That means it is really safe. That’s what the money is saying.”

For the people of Saudi Arabia, the IPO is a huge deal.

“This is their crown jewel,” says Wald. “Many Saudis see this as an opportunity to actually invest in the incredible natural resource that was endowed to their country.”

Saudi investors will be incentivized to buy: They’ll be eligible for one extra share for each 10 they buy within the first 180 days.

But for investors elsewhere, the prospect of buying Aramco shares may be more complicated. The company is essentially owned by the Saudi royal family. In September, Crown Prince Mohammed belatedly acknowledged that he was accountable for the October 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi because “It happened under my watch,” though he did not accept responsibility. The country only lifted its ban on women driving last year, and continues to have a guardianship system that limits women’s rights.

And then there’s Aramco’s environmental record. An investigation by The Guardian found that the company is responsible for 4.38% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

With all that in mind, some investors may not want their pension funds to buy shares of Aramco stock.

“People have issues with Saudi Arabia: with their treatment of women, their issues with human rights. They have issues with fossil fuels,” Wald says. “So people should be aware that this is happening and that this is something that can touch their investments, even if they don’t know it. Even if they haven’t actively decided to go into this.”

But no matter what, Wald predicts the IPO will be a historic moment.

“It will also be the first time that people get a chance to really see Aramco’s books,” she says. “It’s long been this kind of shadowy, mysterious company that has held its secrets very close to its chest. And the idea of of getting inside that and taking a look or a peek inside is really fascinating to a lot of people.”

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Politics is often described as a rough and tumble business. But President Donald Trump is expected to witness an actual blood sport when he takes in a much-hyped mixed martial arts event on Saturday at Madison Square Garden in New York.

This will be Trump’s second sporting event in the span of a week. On Sunday, he attended Game 5 of the World Series at Nationals Park in Washington, where he was met with boos and chants of “lock him up.”

Trump’s visit to New York comes just two days after announcing he and his family are switching their permanent residency from New York to Florida, a move that was met with cheers from some of several prominent Democrats in the state. Explaining his decision on Twitter, Trump said he lamented being “treated very badly by the political leaders” in New York.

Trump who was born, raised, built his businesses and launched his political campaign in New York, says he “hated” to have to make the decision to leave, but that “few have been treated worse” by the city and state elected officials.

He’s switching his residence to Palm Beach, Fla., where he owns the Mar-a-Lago resort, a place he’s dubbed the “winter White House.” Trump has resisted calls to release his state or federal taxes, but by switching residences, he’d go from a city that taxes top earners a 3.876% tax rate, and a state with a top rate of about 9% to Florida, which has no state income tax.

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Donald Trump Jr., right, poses for a photo with Eric Trump at UFC Fight Night Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019, in Newark, N.J.

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Frank Franklin II/AP

Before that paperwork is finalized however, he’s expected to spend much of the weekend in the Big Apple, starting with attending the UFC 244 tournament, headlined by Nate Diaz and Jorge Masvidal. The main event is for a new belt and “title” of BMF, an acronym for “Baddest Motherf*****.”

According to TMZ Sports, the belt cost $50,000 to make and other notables expected to attend include wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Trump’s Connection to Mixed Martial Arts

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UFC President Dana White, center, at a press conference ahead of UFC 244 scheduled for Saturday in New York City. The main event is between Jorge Masvidal, left, and Nate Diaz.

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Michael Owens/Zuffa LLC

While a MMA match may strike some as an unusual place for a commander-in-chief to spend a Saturday night, NPR’s Scott Simon pointed out on Saturday’s Weekend Edition that “the president is a fan and used to book MMA events at his casino in Atlantic City.”

Trump’s dealings with Ultimate Fighting Championship and its President Dana White, go back to 2001 when UFC 30: Battle on the Boardwalk was held at Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

Back then, it was a huge score for the UFC to land a venue like Trump’s. The sport had suffered for years, being banned in several states and disparaged as “human cockfighting” by the late Arizona Sen. John McCain.

In a 2018 interview with The Hill, White spoke about MMA’s “stigma” and that “venues didn’t even want us.”

“I will never say anything negative about Donald Trump,” White said at the time. “He was there when other people weren’t.”

White said he and Trump remain close, even though, for a time, Trump partnered with a rival mixed martial arts outfit called Affliction Entertainment in 2008. Affliction soon tapped out, but the UFC has scrapped its way to being a multi-billion-dollar industry, selling for just over $4 billion in 2016.

“Any good thing that happened to me in my career, Donald Trump was the first to pick up the phone and call and say ‘congratulations, I knew you guys were going to do this,'” White told The Hill.

A month prior to UFC’s sale, White spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, something he said he was “blown away and honored” to do.

“Donald championed the UFC before it was popular, before it grew into a successful business,” White said before a crowd gathered in Cleveland.

“I will always be grateful, so grateful to him for standing with us in those early days. So tonight, I stand with Donald Trump.”

Trump is expected to stay overnight at the Trump Tower in New York on Saturday. He is expected to depart on Sunday, and perhaps add to the traffic congestion that’s already anticipated for the New York City Marathon.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday that he wants to speed up Pacific Gas & Electric’s bankruptcy case, calling on the beleaguered utility’s executives, creditors and shareholders, as well as wildfire victims, to reach “a consensual resolution” to the negotiations before next year’s wildfire season.

“We want to broker that mediation and are calling on all the parties to come in early next week to jumpstart those negotiations,” Newsom said in a Sacramento news conference.

Newsom left little doubt that he is looking beyond the PG&E bankruptcy case and that he envisions a future in which the state takes an active role in restructuring the California’s largest utility.

“It is my hope that the stakeholders in PG&E will put parochial interests aside and reach a negotiated resolution so that we can create this new company and forever put the old PG&E behind us,” Newsom said in statement. “If the parties fail to reach an agreement quickly to begin this process of transformation, the state will not hesitate to step in and restructure the utility.”

PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January when it faced a flood of lawsuits related to California’s wildfires in 2018 caused by its equipment, with potential liabilities estimated at about $30 billion.

California lawmakers over the summer gave PG&E a deadline of June 30, 2020, to exit bankruptcy or forfeit billions of dollars in a state fund established to help utilities pay for future wildfire claims. The law also requires PG&E to spend at least $5 billion on safety improvements to access the fund.

“PG&E, as we know it, cannot persist and continue,” Newsom said in the news conference. “Everybody objectively acknowledges and agrees with that. It has to be completely transformed.”

The Democratic governor also announced that he is appointing his cabinet secretary, Ana Matosantos, as his “de facto energy czar” to help his administration to figure out what “a 21st century utility looks like.”

Newsom’s remarks follow critical comments he has made all week about PG&E as he toured the state’s wildfire areas. He has repeatedly said the power outages imposed in order to mitigate wildfire dangers were “unacceptable.”

“This is not the new normal and this does not take 10 years to solve,” Newsom said.

That remark was an apparent swipe at PG&E Corp. President Bill Johnson who said last month that utility customers could anticipate power outages for the next decade.

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Roger Diwan is vice president of IHS Markit and director for energy and financial markets. Daniel Yergin is vice chairman of IHS Markit and author of The Prize and The Quest.

Syrian oil is suddenly a hot topic in Washington, D.C. The announcement that U.S. forces in Syria, while generally withdrawing, would remain to protect the oil fields has focused a spotlight on the significance of those resources.

Syrian oil has always been of prime importance to President Bashar Assad’s regime. It provided about 25% of government revenues prior to the civil war. But that oil had hardly any importance to the world oil market. At 385,000 barrels per day before the civil war began in 2011, it was barely a footnote for the global market — less than half a percent of world supply.

But the rise of ISIS did suddenly make Syrian oil important to the world community — not in terms of volume but because of what it allowed ISIS to do. During the ISIS “caliphate,” production plunged by 90% to about 40,000 barrels a day in 2015. Yet ISIS was able to turn the barrels under its control into money, smuggling them into Turkey, selling in local markets — and selling to the Assad regime. Still, that minuscule amount of oil earned, at the peak, about half a billion dollars a year for ISIS, giving it the financial heft that no terrorist organization had ever had before, indeed making it by far the richest terrorist organization in the world. Among other things, it enabled ISIS to lure fighters from other groups in Syria and from abroad with higher wages.

With the rollback and then the defeat of ISIS, control of most of the oil fields passed into the hands of the Kurdish forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces. During the campaign against ISIS, the above-ground infrastructure was a target of bombing, aimed at depriving ISIS of revenues, and was further damaged in battles. There was no normal maintenance of the oil system. There are no hard numbers, but it is thought that the total output today is in the 15,000-30,000 barrels a day range. As such, it would still be an important source of revenues for the SDF and the Kurds.

It will take a lot of investment — and time — to bring back the production to the pre-civil war level, and there will be few companies willing to commit even when the sovereignty issues are resolved between the various factions controlling the oil fields.

Syria had a relatively diverse foreign investor mix before the war — from large companies like Total and Sinopec to small companies such as Gulfsands — working alongside the state Syrian Petroleum Company in production-sharing agreements. The ramp-up in violence and European Union sanctions imposed on Syria at the end of 2011 led to an exodus of nearly all the foreign companies.

Yet even prior to the civil war, Syria was not a particularly attractive destination in commercial terms for oil companies. The government took 85% of the revenues from operations, compounded by heavy-handed administration by the regime. The oil fields are concentrated in two regions in the vast eastern desert — one in the northeast of the country and the other along the Euphrates River — and are in no way comparable to the bountiful oil provinces of Iraq or the ones in the Persian Gulf. The reserves in Syria are small, dispersed and far from export facilities on the Mediterranean. Altogether, Syria’s oil resources are marginal in the great oil game of the Middle East and for the world industry.

There are several possible rationales for maintaining U.S. forces in the oil fields. One is to assure that some of these fields do not again fall into the hands of a resurgent ISIS. While ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died a few days ago, and the group’s spokesman was killed, there are still many thousands of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, plus more held in makeshift prisons. Even if there is little chance of the “caliphate” being restored, these fighters could still cause further damage to the fields, which are the most tangible resource that Syria has.

A second possible reason is to keep the oil fields out of the hands of Assad, and possibly the Russians, and maintain as a bargaining chip for the opposition in the course of working out some kind of settlement with the Assad regime. A third would be to preserve these fields as an engine of recovery for the day when there is a post-Assad regime. But, whatever the course, it would be a long time before those fields can begin to even approach the pre-civil war level of production.

And, from the perspective of the global market, they will remain insignificant. Just look at the scale. Syria was at that 385,000 barrels per day in 2011. That same year, the United States produced 5.7 million barrels per day. Since then the U.S. has grown to 12.6 million.

What happens to Syrian oil will be important to the future of Syria itself — as a revenue source for a country that will desperately need money. That, rather than its impact on global supply, is what will make what happens to Syrian oil of significance to the world.

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