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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Updated at 6:04 p.m. ET

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his social media platform will stop running political ads, citing online ads’ “significant risks to politics.” Facebook has been criticized for allowing deceptive political ads.

“We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey tweeted late Wednesday afternoon.

He explained his reasons in a long thread of tweets.

“A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” Dorsey wrote. “Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.

“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

He said that online political ads “present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.”

In an apparent jab at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Dorsey tweeted, with a wink emoji: “it’s not credible for us to say: ‘We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!’ “

Dorsey was referring to Zuckerberg’s decision not to block political speech on Facebook, even if it contains misleading statements.

“Our policy is that we do not fact-check politicians’ speech, and the reason for that is that we believe that in a democracy, it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying,” Zuckerberg told a U.S. House committee last week.

This afternoon, Zuckerberg again defended Facebook’s policy on not checking politicians’ ads during a conference call about the company’s financial performance.

“We need to be careful about adopting more and more rules that restrict the way people can speak and what they can say,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics, including several Facebook employees, say the policy gives politicians free rein to lie and makes it easy to spread those lies.

Facebook workers posted an open letter with 250 signatures to the company’s internal message board, urging Facebook to hold political ads to the same standards as other ads, including being fact-checked.

President Trump’s political campaign criticized Twitter’s move, saying the company is turning its back on a lot of money.

“This is yet another attempt to silence conservatives, since Twitter knows President Trump has the most sophisticated online program ever known,” said Brad Parscale, Trump’s political campaign manager.

While all the major Democratic candidates have spent money on Twitter advertising, two have cleared the $1 million mark, according to figures provided by the company

Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and California Sen. Kamala Harris have each spent $1.1 million with Twitter. Their campaigns did not immediately return requests for comment on how Twitter’s decision could affect their strategy.

NPR’s Alina Selyukh and NPR’s Sean McMinn contributed to this report.

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President Trump is renewing his push for U.S. control of Syrian oil. But experts say there’s not much oil there, and what there is belongs to the Syrian government.

Still, the idea of controlling the oil fields is one that has long appealed to Trump. And it may provide a rationale for maintaining a U.S. military presence in Syria, reversing the president’s promise of a full withdrawal.

“We are leaving soldiers to secure the oil,” Trump told reporters on Sunday, while announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “And we may have to fight for the oil. It’s OK. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.”

In fact, in the best of times Syria produced only about 380,000 barrels of low-quality oil per day. And production has fallen more than 90% during the country’s long civil war. Last year, Syria ranked 75th among countries in the world in oil production, with a daily output comparable to that of the state of Illinois.

“Syrian oil was never important to the world market because production was so small,” said energy expert Daniel Yergin of IHS Markit. “But it was very important to the Assad regime before the civil war because it produced 25% of the total government revenues.”

Trump on Sunday floated the idea of modernizing Syria’s productive capacity with help from a major oil company.

“What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said.

That would be a costly undertaking, according to Joshua Landis, who directs the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

“This whole oil region needs to be rebuilt,” Landis said. “So if America is going to get in the business of retaining these oil fields, it will have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, in theory, to make them exploitable.”

Trump has argued for years that the U.S. should seize Middle Eastern oil fields to recoup some of the cost of its military operations in the region — an idea that experts say violates international law and would only fuel criticism of American intentions.

“In the old days, you when you had a war, to the victors belong the spoils,” Trump told ABC news in 2011.

Emory law professor Laurie Blank says that notion is outdated. “International law seeks to protect against exactly this sort of exploitation,” Blank told Reuters.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — who bitterly criticized the president’s abrupt decision earlier this month to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria — seized on the oil fields as an argument for a continued American presence in the region.

“By continuing to maintain control of the oil fields in Syria, we will deny Assad and Iran a monetary windfall,” Graham said in a statement last week that echoed Trump’s own language. “We can also use some of the revenues from future oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria.”

That position appears to have struck a nerve with Trump.

“I spoke with Lindsey Graham just a little while ago,” Trump said Sunday. “Where Lindsey and I totally agree is the oil.”

For Graham and others, the oil fields may be a way to appeal to the president’s transactional instincts and overcome Trump’s aversion to an open-ended deployment in Syria.

“There are many elements of our foreign policy establishment that want to roll back Iran and want to stay in Syria for the long haul,” Landis said. “Throwing the oil wells in front of President Trump was a way I think they believed that they could reanimate his interest in staying in Syria.”

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Pacific Gas and Electric has expanded its power blackout zone to 940,000 customers across Northern and Central California as extreme weather forecasts threaten to increase the risk of wildfires.

The projected wind gusts of up to 70 mph, combined with dry vegetation, create prime conditions for wildfire.

“Winds of this magnitude pose a higher risk of damage and sparks on the electric system and rapid wildfire spread,” PG&E said in a statement. “The fire risk is even higher because vegetation on the ground has been dried out by recent wind events.”

The planned power outages will affect roughly 90,000 more customers than previous estimates by the utility. Over the course of two to three days, the shutoffs could leave more than 2.5 million people in the dark.

“Charge any devices you might need, have water and nonperishable foods at your disposal, and if you have special medical needs, please be sure to have access to support and resources,” PG&E’s President Andy Vesey said Friday.

Dry, hot and windy conditions were expected to hit the region between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Pacific time Saturday and last through Monday afternoon.

“This wind event is forecast to be the most serious weather situation that Northern and Central California has experienced in recent memory,” said Michael Lewis, PG&E’s senior vice president of electric operations.

When compared to the conditions that fueled the deadly October 2017 wildfires that ripped through Northern California, these winds not only have the potential to be stronger but also the potential to last longer, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Anderson.

“The peak winds during the wildfires in the North Bay in 2017 only lasted four to 6 hours,” Anderson said. “These wind speeds — we’re looking at a range of 24 to 30 hours.”

The planned shutoff is the largest intended to prevent wildfires since PG&E started conducting “public safety power shutoffs” in a handful of counties last year.

The power shutoffs will roll out in six phases, but the utility said times may change depending on weather conditions. The first round of shutoffs were expected as early as 2 p.m. on Saturday, but were delayed, according to PG&E during a press conference Saturday night. The utility said it shut off power in areas of the Northern Sierra Foothills, the Northern Sacramento Valley and the North Bay Area at 5 p.m.

Power shutoffs for the rest of the planned Bay Area regions began around 8 p.m. on Saturday, which were previously scheduled for 5 p.m.

The utility planned to cut power in 36 counties across parts of Humboldt, the Sierra Nevada foothills, Western Sacramento Valley, and every county in the Bay Area except for San Francisco. A sixth phase is scheduled for Kern County on Sunday morning.

You can find the schedule of planned power shutoff times here, and a map marking the latest outages here.

PG&E says it hopes to begin the process of restoring power on Monday.

Two large wildfires drove California Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare states of emergency in Sonoma and Los Angeles counties, which will help communities get state aide.

The Kincade Fire in Sonoma County has burned nearly 25,500 acres since it started Wednesday night, and in northwest Los Angeles, the Tick Fire has burned 4,600 acres.

The state’s largest utility is opting to shut down power lines as a precaution against conditions similar to those that fueled some of California’s most catastrophic fires. NPR previously reported that although the power utility had informed regulators that part of a transmission tower broke not far from the Kincade Fire shortly before it began, it’s not yet clear whether PG&E’s power lines are to blame for sparking the fire.

State fire investigators found PG&E’s electrical lines responsible for last year’s Camp Fire in Northern California, the state’s deadliest wildfire, that killed 85 people.

The fires also prompted billions of dollars in lawsuits and wildfire liabilities that drove the utility to file bankruptcy.

Gov. Newsom announced on Friday that the state would allocate $75 million to support communities with funding for emergency services, power generators and other public health and safety needs during the power outages.

On Saturday, Newsom reiterated criticism of PG&E that he made in a press conference a day earlier – he blamed the utility for prioritizing profit over public safety and condemned the company’s refusal to modernize its grid.

“The impact of [PG&E’s planned power outages] is unacceptable,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. “We’ve got to hold them accountable.”

Reporter Jeremy Siegel and digital producer Audrey Garces are with NPR member station, KQED.

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