It is the end of an era, testifying to the fact that the energy business is completely changing. Exxon, the largest US oil company and until 2013, before the rise of the big Internet companies, first by capitalization in the world, leaves the Dow Jones list, in which it had entered in the distant 1928, almost 100 years ago, just before the Great Recession the following year. The group born from the merger between Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Rockefeller empire had survived that and all the other major financial crises, including that of 2008, but as of Monday 31 August it will no longer be part of the 30 stocks on the main list of Wall Street. It will be replaced by Salesforce, a Californian cloud computing company founded in 1999: its value is around 190 billion and CEO Mark Benioff is also the owner of Time magazine
Exxon's downward trend follows by two years the even more dramatic one of General Electric, the legendary company founded in 1892 by Thomas Edison and which at the beginning of the 2000s was still first in the world by value on the Stock Exchange, before falling into a black crisis. Exxon's state of health, which has been going on for some time to be exact it is called ExxonMobil and operates in Europe under the Esso brand, is instead still good: it is worth 173 billion dollars (about 146 billion euros), but evidently the "black gold" pays for the new ecological paradigm which for some time has also pervaded financial investments. In 2013 Exxon was still worth 400-plus billion, more than Apple which is now worth 2.000.
That of Exxon will not be the only news on the Dow Jones starting from Monday 31 August. Indeed, on that date the split of Apple's own shares will also come into force, which go from 1 to 4 to dilute a value that has become very high (now the Cupertino house capitalizes almost as much as the Italian GDP…), unleashing a domino effect that will also see the exclusion of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (which will be replaced by the biotech Amgen) and of the group active in the military field Raytheon Technologies, whose place will be taken by Honeywell.
