Camilla Dominovsky

Big oil companies buy and sell promises for future oil as well as physical barrels of oil.

When prices suddenly spike, Exxon logs losses on paper trades and gets profits on physical sales.

But the losses show up before the profits, so they're doing even better than the numbers make it seem.

Exxon CEO Darren Woods says he expects oil prices to rise further.

High oil prices have pushed up gasoline prices in the U.S., made worse in recent days by a refinery outage in the Midwest.

Camila Dominovsky, NPR News.

individually, each country wants to produce as much oil as they can to make as much money as they can.

But if every country did that, they would oversupply the market and crash prices.

So they try to aim for a sweet spot, producing just enough that prices are high enough that they make a lot of money per barrel, but low enough that they don't crash the economy.

And the UAE, as a major player in OPEC, had long argued that its share of the total oil pie was

was too small, that it was having to give up more production than other members of the cartel.

And by leaving, UAE will be freed up to produce as much as it can.

But that positive cash flow is dwarfed by the $25 billion Tesla plans to spend this year on things like chips, software, and manufacturing lines to build the humanoid robot called Optimus.

On the sunny rooftop of the Tesla diner in Los Angeles, Optimus was not scooping popcorn, as it's famously done on social media.

That kind of disappointed Tesla investor Alan Jung, but he's still all in on Musk's vision for the future.

I think Tesla will change the world of human beings.

And it's that faith, more than any single quarter's earnings, that has driven Tesla's stock price.

Camilla Dominovsky, NPR News, Los Angeles.

Hello, short wavers.

I am NPR correspondent Camilla Dominovsky, filling in as host.